CS 377 CTU What Were the Most Compelling Topics Learned in This Course Questions

Summative Discussion Board

Review and reflect on the knowledge you have gained from this course. Based on your review and reflection, write at least 3 paragraphs on the following:

How did participating in discussions help your understanding of the subject matter? Is anything still unclear that could be clarified?

Responses to Other Students: Respond to at least 2 of your fellow classmates with at least a 100-word reply about his or her Primary Task Response regarding items you found to be compelling and enlightening. To help you with your discussion, please consider the following questions:

1st peer

Having never had experience with formal software development, the entirety of this course was compelling, and challenging. The process of working through what a program is expected to do, and documenting how it does it, is daunting, and requires a lot of discipline, however, breaking the process down, as this course does, helps significantly. Specifically, framing the planning and development around use cases (Break, 2017), and building additional models from them, provided a great framework for understanding the subject matter, and the development process as a whole.

The discussions were helpful in understanding the topics for each week. While the weekly discussion boards and submissions covered overlapping topics, the discussion boards provided the opportunity to understand the models for the week, independent of how they may reflect or depend on the other models in the key assignment, granting additional clarity. Additionally, seeing how my other classmates ingested the information also helps to provide extra perspectives to the topic.

The best addition for this course would be to have an additional submission, or discussion board, assignment for each week, where a first draft or sample of that week’s model is submitted for review. Due to it being my first experience with these models, it was periodically difficult to gage whether or not I was adequately understanding a topic. The additional checkpoint would help establish whether my understanding is in line with expectations, or off base.

Sources:

Break, T. (2017, October 6). The Use Case Approach. TMA World. https://www.tmaworld.com/our-thinking/use-case-approach#:%7E:text=A%20use%20case%20can%20be%20written%20in%20different%20levels%20of,sentences%20summarizing%20the%20use%20case.&text=Fully%20dressed%20use%20case%3A%20A,goals%2C%20tasks%2C%20and%20requirements

2nd peer to respond to

This course for me has been more challenging than I had anticipated. I have learned a lot about object-oriented design and how it is used to turn real world problems into software solutions. I believe that one of the more compelling things that I have learned in this class is with the different diagrams that are used to describe a software system from various perspectives. I think that the activity diagram is probably one of my favorites. Though activity diagrams are process based, they can still be beneficial in object-oriented design because they can provide a visual high-level description of operational functionality (Britton & Doake, 2005). For me I felt that the activity diagram was much more intuitive than some of the others because it can clearly depict a logical flow of events.

I enjoyed doing the discussion boards for this class a lot. There are always so many perspectives shared about the way others view and understand the information that we are learning, and I feel that it adds more diversity to my own perspective. I believe that it is important to understand how other people can see things in much different ways based on their own experiences and perspectives. I feel as though we have gotten a great introduction to everything that is involved in the process of software design and I look forward to learning more in the future.

As far as the overall course design I felt that it is solid in providing the essential knowledge to understand the process of object-oriented design. I did, however, feel that there was a lot of repetitious work throughout the course within the assignments, mainly because we were working with several somewhat generalized use cases that did not necessarily differ from each other as much as it would seem. Though there is definitely a benefit to learning from repetition, I feel that I personally would have liked to learn more of the capabilities of each type of design artifact rather than multiple basic implementations of each. Overall, I felt that this was a great course that has most definitely laid a strong foundation for my future in software design.

References

Britton, C., & Doake, J. (2005). Activity Diagrams. In A student guide to object-oriented development (pp. 201-220). Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann.