Software construction

Summary

Learn how to design and implement reliable, maintainable, and efficient software using a mix of programming skills (declarative style, higher-order functions, inductive types, parallelism) and fundamental software construction concepts (reusability, abstraction, encapsulation, composition, proofs)

Content

Learning Prerequisites

Required courses

Any previous programming course

Recommended courses

CS-107 Introduction à la programmation

CS-108 Pratique de la programmation orientée-objet

Important concepts to start the course

Loops, conditionals, variable and type declarations, computing mathematical expressions

Learning Outcomes

• Implement reliable, efficient, and maintainable software
• Identify data types and operations that lead to computational solutions
• Argue that an solution is correct
• Transform a program to change its behavior in a desirable way
• Design and implement data-parallel software using parallel collections

Teaching methods

• Ex cathedra (live lectures)
• Recorded videos
• Exercise and lab sessions
• Online discussions

Expected student activities

• Attending lectures
• Watching and understanding recorded videos
• Solving exercises individually or in groups
• Completing individual graded programming assignments (labs / mini-projects)
• Completing midterm and end-of-semester exams

Assessment methods

• 30% Midterm exam during the semester
• 40% Final exam during the exam session
• 30% Programming assignments (labs)

Supervision

Resources

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

Yes

Moodle Link

• https://go.epfl.ch/CS-214

Prerequisite for

CS-320 Computer language processing

CS-311 The Software enterprise - from ideas to products

CS-452 Foundations of software

CS-550 Formal verification