ECE297 — Software Design and Communication

A course on software design in C++ and engineering communication. Preceded by ECE244 — Programming Fundamentals.

Two useful textbooks are:

• CLRS; for Dijkstra’s algorithm, travelling salesman problem, etc.
• AIMA; for local search as well as advanced topics like simulated annealing.

Software design

• 10x programmer
• Debugging
  • Infection model
  • Wolf-fence algorithm
  • Detective method
• Programming styles
  • Team programming
  • Pair programming
• Program testing
  • Unit test
  • Profiling
  • chrono.h
• Graph theory
  • Pathfinding
  • Shortest path problem
• Data structure
  • Hash table
  • Vector (C++)
  • Heap
• Algorithms
  • Depth-first search
  • Breadth-first search
  • Dijkstra’s algorithm
  • A-star algorithm
  • Heuristic
  • Greedy algorithm
• Travelling salesman problem
  • Computational complexity theory
  • NP-completeness
  • Algorithms and heuristics
    • 2-opt
    • 3-opt
    • Simulated annealing
      • Boltzmann distribution
      • Random number generation
• Parallel computing
  • Thread
    • Multithreading
    • Hyperthreading
    • Mutex
  • Race condition
  • OpenMP (omp)
  • Amdahl’s law

C++ language features

• Templates (Standard Template Library)
• Iterator
• Data types (auto) and range-based for loops
• Inline function

Tools

• OpenStreetMap (StreetDatabaseAPI)
• Version control (Git)
  • Branch
• Compilation (Makefile)
• Virtual machine (Oracle VM VirtualBox)
• SSH
• VNC (iCtrl)
• Integrated development environment (CLion)
• Linux (Debian)
• Valgrind
• GTK (Glade, EZGL)

Communication

• Made to Stick
  • Idea stickiness
  • Curse of knowledge
  • Simplicity
  • Unexpectedness
  • Credibility
  • Emotions
  • Stories
• Whistleblowing
• Engineering communication
  • Waterfall
  • Agile
• Toulmin model

Extra notes

We have three Makefile configurations:

• make conf="release"
• make conf="debug"
• make conf="debug-check
• and make clean
• Also add the -j16 flag to parallelise compilations.

To run the autotester for milestone $n$, we use ece297exercise n. To submit, we use ece297submit n.