Advanced Software Engineering Workshop SENG3011 24T1

Course Reflections

Posted by Basem Suleiman Thursday 25 April 2024, 03:58:56 PM.

Hello SENG3011 Students,

We hope you've managed to complete all your assessment work and progressing well with preparation for the exams.

It's been a great journey with all of you have been working on real-world project ideas in the FinTech industry using modern software development practices and tools used in most leading software companies. Developing microservices ecosystem collaboratively as one financial organization and by adopting DevOps practices and agile tools should have added invaluable experience to every student's learning.

This has been challenging not only for all students but also for the teaching staff. The learning environment we intended to create try to simulate the real-world and complex environment for software development teams in practice. This demanded considerable effort to setup AWS and all other tools and technologies and continuously support it before and throughout the term. From your side, it also required significant effort and dedication to learn it and employ it as a team to continuously develop financial data microservices that can be integrated to generate intelligent event-based applications and services at scale. You discovered and worked with real-world datasets to create commercial financial services that can add business value and help to solve unique problems for individuals and organizations. Working as a team with the technical tools and practices as well as experiencing the social aspects of teamwork were an integral part of your learning and project journeys.

It's been inspiring to see all your innovative outcomes and understanding of the social and technical aspects of such software engineering projects at scale. From your demonstrations, we have been inspired by several great application ideas, technical breadth and depth of modern software architecture, leadership and social aspects of teamwork and skills and knowledge you developed from the project experience. These outcomes are pleasing as it realizes the gaols of this workshop which is creating professional software engineers and leaders who strongly compete for relevant software engineering roles in the industry!

Optiver, the main course sponsor, has been amazed with the knowledge and skills developed from this workshop. Optiver is looking forward to the project demonstrations of the best achieving teams. They also keen to consider students from this workshop as it aligns with their and industry's tools, practices, and technologies.

This journey should not stop at the end of this term. We strongly encourage all of you to explore potential pathways to employ the knowledge and skills, and the project you've developed into the real-world environment. You may consider discussing the project ideas and experience in your next job interviews and potential employers. You may also consider taking the next steps to develop the application you've built and explore a startup journey to develop a commercial product using UNSW Founders services (free to all students). Regardless which journey you may choose, we will be around to support you and provide advice at any time. Feel free to reach out to ask for an advice and share your stories!

The workshop journey would not be complete without learning about your insights and experiences. We have tried our best to implement new changes and improving the workshop based on experiences from last year. There's always a room for improvement and we would love to hear from every student about their experiences, things you enjoyed and learned from and things that could be improved. As past SENG students contributed to improving this workshop, your thoughts and constructive feedback would be crucial for all future SENG students. The MyExperience survey deadline is today (25 Apr. 11:59 pm). Please complete it from https://myexperience.unsw.edu.au/unsw/ . Your voice and feedback will be heard and appreciated!

Thank you for being an amazing class and all the best in your exams and future Endeavor!

Dr. Basem Suleiman and the SENG3011 Teaching Team.

AWS Resources - Backup

Posted by Basem Suleiman Thursday 25 April 2024, 02:14:03 PM.

Hello everyone,

I hope you're all doing well and having a refreshing time before the exams.

There have been inquiries about AWS resources and accounts used in this workshop. We are happy to extend the time to use AWS accounts and resources and keep it open for everyone in this workshop. The planned date to stop all AWS accounts is 17 May, 11:59 pm. Make sure you and our team create appropriate backup of your project work on AWS.

You may continue improving your application, if you want to, by conducting any further testing or exploring the use of any additional cloud services. This would also help you to explore and learn other services you might have been interested in but did not have the time during the busy term.

I also encouraged all of you to continue exploring your project journey and consider extending it as commercial product and try to embrace a start-up journey. If you plan to do so, the AWS accounts and setup should help to progress in this direction smoothly. Please let us know if you need any further support.

If you have any special request to access additional/new cloud services, please reach out to me by email and copy the course admin.

Good luck!

Week 10 Updates and Highlights

Posted by Basem Suleiman Monday 15 April 2024, 05:09:53 PM.

Hello SENG3011 students,

As we enter the final week of this workshop, here are some important highlights:

• Please ensure that your final report specification and engineering proposal have been approved by your mentor.
• The Shark Tank presentations will occur during your tutorial session this week. Please join the TEAMS meeting organized by your tutor and share your screen with slides for recording purposes. The meeting will automatically record all presentations.
• Similar to Sprint 1, two mentors will be marking your presentation to balance the views on the marking.
• Your presentation is limited to a maximum of 18 minutes. Please allocate sufficient time to demonstrate your amazing product during this period.
• Your spritnt 3 is Teamwork but remember that the portfolio submission is an individual task. Please ensure you submit your portfolio on time.
• The performance metrics and additional guidelines to assist you in writing your individual portfolio have been added to Confluence - see https://unswcse.atlassian.net/wiki/x/AwCYFg

Optiver Project Award:

• The Optiver's 3rd Software Engineering prize will be awarded to the best project/s from this SENG3011. A number of teams will be chosen on the basis of the quality and innovation/creativity of the final Sprint 3 demo and report.
• Selected teams will be asked to prepare a 20 to 30 minute presentation explaining their design and prototype implementation of their project work. The presentation will be made to Optiver staff who will be acting as judges.
• Keep the good work up and continue improving your project. This award will give great recognition to the best quality project.

Help/consultation sessions & weekly feedback:

• There will be online help/consultation session on Wedneday 4:00-5:00 PM to support groups/students who may still have questions about the assessment and project work. The link to the online session will be shared on WebCMS and Ed.
• We have weekly mentors meeting to discuss course related matters. Feel free to share any feedback you may have with your mentor or by reaching out to the course admin/LiC. We would love to hear from you and identify potential ways to maximize your learning expereicne.

Infrastructure support:

You can send an email to the course admin to request special AWS services. Here are some common AWS services that students have requested (you may request any other services too):

• Cognito
• Elasticache
• Secret Manager
• SES (Simple Email Service)
• SNS (Simple Notification Service)
• SQS (Simple Queue Service)
• Step Function
• Amplify

MyExperince Surveys :

Thanks to all of you who have completed myExperience so far. If you haven’t yet participated, you can find the myExperience link in your student email or access it from UNSW MyExperience site - https://myexperience.unsw.edu.au/

Your honest and constructive thoughts are valued, and help not only students taking this course, but the course teaching staff, and across UNSW to create positive changes in their courses moving forward. Your thoughts also make a difference for the next group of students taking these courses, just as thoughts from students taking courses you plan to take make a difference for you.

Please know that myExperience is confidential and your identity is not included in reports. Results of the survey are not made available until your course results are released."

Wishing you a productive week and best of luck in your final assessments!

SENG3011 Teaching Team.