Link Search Menu Expand Document

UCLA CS 130: Software Engineering (Spring 2025)

Table of contents

  1. Course description
  2. Important links
  3. Instructors
  4. Lectures
  5. Discussions / TAs
  6. Prerequisites
  7. Textbook and Readings
  8. Class project
  9. Exams
  10. Grading
  11. Academic Honesty
  12. 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++.

Code Review (Git/Gerrit)
https://code.cs130.org
Piazza discussions
https://piazza.com/ucla/spring2025/cs130
E-mail instructors
ucla-cs130-admin@googlegroups.com

Instructors

Michael Burns
mbx@g.ucla.edu
Eric Hennigan
eric.hennigan@gmail.com
Alex Monroe
alexrmonroe@gmail.com
Philo Juang
pjuang@google.com

Lectures

Class
Mondays and Wednesdays
4pm - 5:50pm
Franz Hall 1178
Office hours
Book on calendar - Alex or e-mail instructors to schedule.

Discussions / TAs

TA
Burak Yetistiren burak@cs.ucla.edu
TA
Kalon Kelley klkelley@cs.ucla.edu
TA
Christopher Vattheuer chrisvatt@cs.ucla.edu
TA
Arvind Vepa amvepa91@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 Topics Reading
March 31 1 Course overview
Development environments
Source control
 
April 2 2 Testing  
April 7 3 Code Reviews
Tools for web server development
 
April 9 4 Build systems
Deployment
 
April 14 5 Testing, refactoring, and debugging a web server  
April 16 6 Testability
Integration testing
Mocks
Dependency Injection
 
April 21 7 Static analysis
Instructor Q&A
 
April 23 8 Logging and exception handling  
April 28 9 APIs  
April 30 12 Threading and Concurrency  
May 5 10 Class API standardization  
May 7 11 Writing Readable Code  
May 12 13 Web server & Distributed system architecture
Anti-patterns
 
May 14 - Midterm  
May 19 14 Performance
Capacity planning
Profiling
 
May 21 15 Invariant testing
Monitoring
 
May 26 - Memorial Day  
May 28 16 Documentation
Team structure
Postmortems
 
June 2 17 Deployments
Experiments
Launches
UX Design Guest
 
June 4 18 Team overviews  
June 9 - Final, 8:00am-11:00am  

Back to top

“You may think using Google’s great, but I still think it’s terrible.” —Larry Page

Page last modified: April 1, 2025.