UCLA CS 130: Software Engineering (Fall 2025)
Table of contents
- Course description
- Important links
- Instructors
- Lectures
- Discussions / TAs
- Prerequisites
- Textbook and Readings
- Class project
- Exams
- Grading
- Academic Honesty
- Class Schedule
Course description
Principles relevant to creating large-scale software projects as opposed to small one-person efforts. The class emphasizes scalable software engineering practices, teamwork, processes, and tools. The core of this class is a team project to implement and deploy a web server in C++.
Important links
- Code Review (Git/Gerrit)
- https://code.cs130.org
- Piazza discussions
- https://piazza.com/ucla/fall2025/cs130
- E-mail instructors
- ucla-cs130-admin@googlegroups.com
Instructors
- Michael Burns
- mbx@g.ucla.edu
- Alex Monroe
- alexrmonroe@gmail.com
- Philo Juang
- pjuang@google.com
Lectures
- Class
- Mondays and Wednesdays
6pm - 7:50pm
Franz Hall 1178 - Office hours
- Book online or e-mail instructors to schedule.
Discussions / TAs
- TA
- Eric Zhou zitongzhou@cs.ucla.edu
- TA
- Kalon Kelley klkelley@cs.ucla.edu
Prerequisites
- CS111: Operating Systems
- CS131: Programming Languages
- (Suggested) CS118: Networking
Textbook and Readings
- (Suggested) Kernighan and Pike, The Practice of Programming
- Additional readings on the web
Class project
During this course you will join a team of other students and complete a project in which you will jointly develop a configurable, scalable server and deploy it for public access on Google Cloud with appropriate logging and monitoring. The goal of this is to learn and practice sound development practices including thoughtful API design, maintainable coding style, automated testing, and peer code review.
Assignments will be posted on this website each Monday after noon for specific milestones of the project, and will be due the following Monday morning by 11:59PM, submitted via online form. Students will be graded on their individual contributions for each assignment, as well as the health of the project and the functionality of the server.
Assignment topics include:
- Repository setup, Unit tests, Code reviews (individual assignment)
- Simple echo server, Deployment
- Continuous build, Test coverage, Web server testing
- Serving static files
- API proposal and presentation (no late work accepted)
- Refactoring
- Reverse proxy, Threading
- Self and peer evaluations (individual assignment)
Exams
Exam questions will be drawn from lectures, readings, and assignments. Exam structure is TBD due to remote teaching.
Grading
Course grade breakdown:
- Assignments
- 60%
- Instructor Assessment
- 10%
- Midterm
- 15%
- Final
- 15%
Work and exams will be graded on an absolute scale.
A curve may be applied, but only to students’ benefit (your grade will never decrease as a result of a curve)
Academic Honesty
For exams, presentations, and written work (other than code), normal standards of academic honesty apply, as outlined in the UCLA Student Conduct Code.
For computer code, reading and adapting publically available code is encouraged, and in some cases may be necessary. You must cite your source in a comment, in the form of a URL.
Class Schedule
Date | Lecture | Title |
---|---|---|
Monday, September 29, 2025 | 1 | Course Overview & The Dev Workflow |
Wednesday, October 1, 2025 | 2 | Practical Testing & Testability |
Monday, October 6, 2025 | 3 | HTTP Basics & Code Reviews |
Wednesday, October 8, 2025 | 4 | Build Systems & Containerization (Docker) |
Monday, October 13, 2025 | 5 | Cloud Deployment & CI/CD |
Wednesday, October 15, 2025 | 6 | Server Architecture & AI as a Co-pilot |
Monday, October 20, 2025 | 7 | Static Analysis & The Art of Readable Code |
Wednesday, October 22, 2025 | 8 | Refactoring & Debugging Strategies |
Monday, October 27, 2025 | 9 | API Design & Web Security |
Wednesday, October 29, 2025 | Midterm | |
Monday, November 3, 2025 | 10 | API Design & Voting |
Wednesday, November 5, 2025 | 11 | TBD |
Monday, November 10, 2025 | 12 | Scaling a Web Service |
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 | 13 | Monitoring & Dashboards |
Monday, November 17, 2025 | 14 | Documentation & Postmortems |
Wednesday, November 19, 2025 | 15 | Deployments, Experiments & Launches |
Monday, November 24, 2025 | 16 | Team Structure & Your Career |
Wednesday, November 26, 2025 | 17 | Thanksgiving Break (no class) |
Monday, December 1, 2025 | 18 | Team presentations |
Wednesday, December 3, 2025 | 19 | TBA |
Monday, December 8, 2025 | Final |