Software Engineering: Final Thoughts

Over the course of this semester, I learned about a lot of new concepts such as continuous integration, issue tracking, and configuration management. The application of these techniques can assist in making development more efficient and productive. These are valuable techniques that can be applied to future projects. I feel that learning these new skills have helped me become a more productive developer and I will try to continue practicing these techniques in the future.

There were also a number of new tools such as CheckStyle, JUnit, PMD, FindBugs, and Ant that were introduced that assist development by automating tasks that would otherwise have to be done by the developer. While these tools cannot guarantee code quality, they allow developers to concentrate on other more important tasks. This allows developers to use their time more productively.

I found the most valuable part of this course to be the experiences that I gained while developing the different projects. Each project taught new skills such as learning about an existing project by reading code. The projects also provided me experience in the development of a system that could be used by consumers. Up to this point, I only had experience developing school-type applications that couldn't be used in the real world. Also, we learned about team management which is useful since, when we get hired, we will most likely be working as part of a team of developers. We had to learn about time management, division of responsibility, and effective communication methods in order to have a successful project. These aspects can be applied to any team project and are critical to the success of the project.

I would like to have learned more about development of web applications. The final project required us to create a web application. The development of the final application was done in just a couple of weeks which didn't give us much time to learn everything. I wish that we had more time to become more proficient with the Wicket Framework, HTML, and CSS because skills with these tools can be applied to many different areas.

Overall, I found this class to be very useful. It taught me many different skills that I am able to take with me and apply in other projects. I think that I have become a more effective developer because of the new techniques and tools that I have learned about.