This page will contain announcements relevant to SE 101 students. Look here for late-breaking news about labs or assignments, embellishments or corrections to lecture material, etc. Announcements will be dated and listed in order of most-recent-announcement-first.
Benoit will be offering the Resume Workshop / Interview Skills session in the WEEF lab on Monday December 20th starting at 13h00. Please prepare a resume before the session (do your best with the knowledge that you have) and bring 3 hard copies (stapled); you can use the printers in the WEEF lab if you want, but come in early so that we can start at 13h00. You will need a pencil or a pen.
This session does not count for academic credit, it is informal and it is offered only to get you better prepared for co-op in January and to ensure that the best junior jobs go to SE students! Please come even if you already have a good resume and interview skills, as you will be helping others and you will still learn a few tricks.
You can see the summary of your marks for SE101 here. Identify your marks with the last four digits of your student number.
Please e-mail Benoit if there are any problems.
Quiz 3 has been marked and the average is 78 %. You can pick it up in the bins beside the WEEF lab. Since we have no lectures together anymore, here are a few comments:
Q1c) Only if you were found to have been negligent would you be at risk of losing your license.
Q2) Very well done (grammar)
Q3) Horribly done. The section on intellectual property is only memorization; it should not be difficult.
Q4) Great, but scary, ideas for the possible hazards:
Q5) MEASURABLE is the keyword. Always give quantities to compare or assert the quality of your product.
Bonus) The marking scheme seemed to lead many of you to think that
there were only three errors. Nevertheless, one student found the 7
errors.
You can find the solution here.
The final marks also will be posted soon,
All of the unclaimed assignments have been placed in the hand-out boxes beside the WEEF lab.
Quiz 3 will be given back by the end of next week.
The schedules for the 15-minute periods reserved for the final reports have been posted on Benoit's door (E2-1318) and on Julie's door (EIT-3117).
Review 8 (the last review) is now available. You may access it by logging onto your UW-ACE account.
Today's SE 101 Lecture is cancelled. The lecture slides are available on the course web site. Don't worry about the slides on the Therac-25 or Darlington case studies. What you should take away from the slides are the various ways of addressing hazards (identifying hazards, identifying causes, etc.) and the ways of adapting the safety-analysis techniques (checklists, FTA, etc.) so that they apply to software hazards.
Lab on Thursday is WHMIS. If you have not already taken WHMIS at U. Waterloo, you must attend lab on Thursday and you must bring your Watcard. You need WHMIS to progress to 1B.
We'll do course critiques in lecture next week.
There is a typo in the Ethics Memo Scenario. The end of the fifth paragraph of the scenario reads, "...but they say anything." Should it read, "...but they don't say anything."
The seventh web review is now available. You may access it anytime by logging onto your UW-ACE account.
Please note that the description of the ethics memo is now available. The memo is due next Thursday at 16:30.
Please go and visit the website for the Concordia Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC) to learn more about it and register.
Benoit: I went last year and I had a lot fun for the three days. There were talks and workshops from graduate students, professors, and industry leaders. I participated in the first software engineering competition with another 100 students or so. At night, we were free to go and visit the city. The conference helped me to meet many other students from the classes of 2006 and 2008, and also from other universities.
The solution for Quiz 2 is here. Note that question 1 is now worth only 8 points, so the quiz is out of 38.
The marking scheme for the final report is now under Design Report on the left. You can obtain up to 207 points for the report. In addition, your presentation is worth 50 points. The total (257 points) will be worth 40 % of your final grade.
Julie will have office hours on Friday from 12h30 to 13h30 and from 15h30 to 17h00. You are welcome to drop in at any other time.
Benoit will have office hours on Friday at 18h00 if there is demand. Send him an e-mail if you would like to go. He has also his regular office hours on Mondays and Thursdays.
As it is often seen in SE courses, the SE101 teaching team will not be answering questions about the final report on Monday the 15th. This practice is meant to discourage you from procrastinating.
The Linux version of Intellego and Lejos are compatible with Max OS X. The link was updated.
You can now submit your simulation Java code. Do not take any risks: submit early and often. Please submit only one file per team (we should receive only 11 files).
Your file will temporarily go on the CS133 account, so use the
following command:
submit cs133 simulation [filename].java
The Cover Letter example was updated (again). The closing and the signature were moved to be left aligned.
The Table of Contents example is now listed in the menu on the left.
The sixth web review is now available. You may access it anytime by logging onto your UW-ACE account.
Benoit uploaded a review sheet for binary number representations. In addition to the slides, it is an excellent way to get ready for the quiz.
The Cover Letter example was updated. The university's postal code was corrected to N2L 3G1. You need to make this change to your documents before submitting the final report.
Benoit will have two extra sessions in the WEEF lab for you to work on the design project. The first one will be this Saturday, November 6, from 13h to 17h. The second one will be Monday November 8 from 18h30 to 20h30.
There are now eight pictures of the Lego Robot and of the board that you can use for your design report. You can access them by the left menu, under Design Project.
A Linux version of Lejos and Intellego are now available under Design Project in the menu on the left.
The fifth web review is now available. You may access it anytime by logging onto your UW-ACE account.
Solutions to Review #4 have been modified as follows:
Q13) Both F and H are accepted.
Clearly, considering the trade-offs is an analysis task. Because the
analysis has to do with optimizing the speed of the robot,
it is possible that this analysis be done during optimization.
Q15) Both A and B are accepted.
The project description is more than a recognition of need because it
contains several details of the problem.
However, it is not a complete description of the problem: students have
to study the world and study the capabilities and limitations of their
robot before they can start designing their solution.
Solutions to Quiz #1 can be found here.
Information about how to contact Engineering Counselling Services can be found on their web site.
Please come to the following rooms tonight from 19h00 to 22h00:
If you don't know where your room is, please go see earlier. You can bring a non-programmable calculator and a cheat sheet. You should familiarize yourself with all details ahead of time; they are posted on the wall near Benoit's office (in CPH)
You can now see the marking scheme that will be used for your draft report. Look in the menu on the left or here.
The new due date is Friday October 15 at 12h30.
Just a reminder for you to take a look at www.softeng.uwaterloo.ca before next lab. You can click on current students and then your class (2009 1A) to get specific information about this term. You can also browse for what science electives are elligible for next term. In exceptional situations, you may take a course that is not a science elective; talk to Software Engineering staff before you make your mind. For example, if your grammar skills are low (check your technical memo), you may want to take an English class before a science class. This change could create scheduling conflicts in later terms so you need to ask permission to switch your science elective. Also, take a look at options that you can graduate with, such as the Management Science Option.
Click administration to get information about the people who will help you to make career decisions.
In the lab on October 14, Benoit will explain in more details the electives, course sequencing, procedure for using Quest, etc. Try to have an idea of the courses that you would like to take in 1B before the lab.
The fourth web review is now available. You may access it anytime by
logging onto your UW-ACE account.
Also, I've added to the lecture on floating-point number systems a
slide on how to determine the
floating-point representation of a number; you might find that slide
helpful when working on the review.
Both TRUE and FALSE will be accepted for question 19 in Review 3.
Both TRUE and FALSE will be accepted for question 18 in Review 3. The reasoning follows:
Brackets around the date and around the URL are "ugly", to use Dupre's terminology -- that is, they are technically correct, but they clutter the reference. Italicizing the title would be acceptable if the work-term-report guidelines were deemed a manual, rather than simply a web page. Since the guidelines document is probably best considered a web-page publication, and because the brackets are not used in any of the examples in the IEEE guidelines, both answers to question 18 will be accepted.
Several corrections were made to Reviews 1 and 2.
| Question | Old Answer | New Answer |
|---|---|---|
| Review 1, Question 4 | Mechanical | Mechanical or Electrical |
| Review 2, Question 6 | B | B or C |
| Review 2, Question 8 | True | True or False |
| Review 2, Question 10 | True | True or False |
| Review 2, Question 11 | True | True or False |
In addition, Review 2 - Question 13 was set to 0 points by error. It has now been corrected and is worth 1 point.
For your information, you can now see your mark for Web Review 3.
You can pick up your technical memorandums from the hand-out bins next to the WEEF lab. They are located on the side of the lab, very close to the hand-in bins. Look for bins labelled S[A-F].
If you did not write your student number or block on your memo, Benoit still has it in his office. You can pick it up at anytime (if he is in his office). Benoit will bring them to the lab this Thursday.
All memos were received on time :-)
but the average is 6.0 / 10 :-(
Benoit will bring the marking scheme to lab, and he will spend some time on common errors and advice.
You are welcome to go see Benoit for any questions regarding marking. Remember that the memo is a learning exercise worth only 5 % of your final mark. That is, do not come to argue for a single mark.
A number of students have pointed out that there were problems with questions 6, 8, 10, 11 in Review 2, and I've asked Benoit to remark the reviews to accept multiple answers. See the Review FAQ for details. Benoit will announce when he has completed the remarking and you can see your new scores.
The third web review is now available. You may access it anytime by logging onto your UW-ACE account.
The second web review is now available. You may access it anytime by logging onto your UW-ACE account
The answers for the first web review are now available. You can log in to your UW-ACE account and go to Review 1. This time, you will only be able to see your mark and answers, as well as the solutions.
If you have problems with your review, contact Jo (jmatlee@se.uwaterloo.ca) or come during office hours.
The average for the first review is 74 %. In the future, we will try to make the answers available soon after the reviews. All reviews will be available until the end of lectures in December.
The first web review is now available. You may access it anytime by
logging onto your UW-ACE account
You will need to enter your Quest/UWdir userid and password to access
your account. It turns out that we cannot provide you a URL that links
directly to the review (the UW-ACE people are looking into it), so for
now, you will need to navigate to the review. We have eliminated all of
the folders that we are not using in this course, so it should be
relatively obvious how to find the review (click on "continue", and
thereafter click on the one visible folder).
If you have problems with your review, contact Jo
(jmatlee@se.uwaterloo.ca) or Benoit (blaroche@student.cs.uwaterloo.ca)
as soon as possible, so that we can help you to recover before the
submission date and time.Otherwise, this review might become the one
you end up dropping.
Here are some things you can do before coming to the first lecture.