UCLA CS 130: Software Engineering (Spring 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/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 |