Overall Experience

          Forty-one class days, nineteen papers, three exams, six projects, one presentation, and numerous example programs later, the class is finally over. Overall, I learned a lot of different things in this class, more of them useful than not. If I could make a few suggestions in the course I would suggest having more homework rather than simply just projects. The projects are very useful learning experiences, but I think there was a disjoint between the assigned readings, the quizzes, the projects, the lectures, and the tests. I think that homework structured more like the exams would bridge this gap. I know that I personally learn through practice, but I didn't find adequate practice for the exams in the course material. Even though the exams were mostly programming, the only programming practice we got was in the projects and the projects were far different from the exams.
          I wish we would have talked about the assigned readings more in class. It was not clear why we read some of the papers, such as the paper on Gender Differences, since we never discussed the implications of the paper in class. I found the paper very interesting, but was not sure what gender differences had to do with software engineering. It seemed as though most of the papers were only covered in one question on a quiz and were not covered any further. I would have liked it if there was more of a connection between all the parts of the course - the projects, readings, lectures, and exams - but I do think that each aspect was interesting and useful in its own right. I would have liked if there was more of a global picture of what software engineering embodies.
          I definitely learned a lot of programming techniques that I'm sure I will find very useful in the future. For instance, I found Assembla to be extremely helpful and have used it in my other two programming courses this semester. The programming assignments in these courses also involved pair programming, and git made it very easy to share code between my partner and I and to backtrack when we found bugs. I also think that the issue tracker will be a handy tool in the future.
          Overall, I enjoyed how practical this course is. At the beginning of this semester, I wondered whether this course would prove to be as valuable as I thought it could be and this has since been confirmed. I like how this course is focused on situations you would see in the real world - pair programming, issue tracking, refactoring, version control. Even the projects are tasks you may see in real life, such as programming a website. I surely need all of these things since I graduated just yesterday and will soon be heading off into the real world.