Software Systems

This is the homepage for the software systems course. You can find most course information here.

This course is part of the CESE masters programme. This course is a continuation of the curriculum of Software Fundamentals and will help prepare you for the Embedded Systems Lab.

For students who did not follow Software Fundamentals

Software Fundamentals is marked as a prerequisite for Software Systems. On the course's website you can find the slides of the course, and read back from the provided lecture notes. The reason it's marked as a prerequisite, is that we expect that you know the basics of the Rust programming language before taking Software Systems.

Software fundamentals was a course exclusively for students that didn't already have a background in computer science. That's because we expect that if you did have a computer science background, you can pick up on Rust's properties pretty quickly from our notes and the rust book. We advise you to read through this, and invest a few hours to get acquainted with Rust before taking Software Systems. What may help is that the assignments of Software Fundamentals are still available on weblab. We won't manually grade any more solutions, but many assignments are fully automatically graded.

Part 1

This course consists of two parts over 8 weeks. The first 4 weeks will have weekly lectures and assignments. In part one, we will have 4 weeks, mainly about three subjects:

• Programming with concurrency
• Measuring and optimizing programs for performance
• Programming for embedded systems (without the standard library). We will spend 2 weeks on this.

This part will be taught by Jonathan Dönszelmann.

For this part we recommend the book Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos, as further reading material.

Part 2

In part two, which is the rest of the course, we will look at another 3 subjects related to model-based software development. We will cover the following main subjects:

• UML, a standardized modelling language to visualize the design of software
• Finite state machines.
• Domain specific languages and (rust) code generation based on them.

This second part will be taught by Rosilde Corvino and Guohao Lan

Deadlines

In both parts there will be exercises with roughly weekly deadlines. The first deadline for part 1 is already early, in the second week. The first deadlines for part two will be after the Christmas break. You do each assignment in a group of 2. This group will be the same for each assignment, and you can sign up for a group in Brightspace under the "collaboration" tab. After you do so, you get a gitlab repository with a template for the assignment within a day or so.

Note that you need a minimum grade of a 5.0 for each of the parts to pass this course.

All assignments (at least for part 1) are published at the start of the course. That means you could technically work ahead. However, note that we synchronized the assignments with the lectures. This means that if you do work ahead, you may be missing important context needed to do the assignments.

The time for the deadline for assignment 2 may look a lot shorter than the other deadlines. That's because we extended the deadline for assignment 1 to give you a little more time at the start of the course, not because the second deadline is actually much shorter.

Late Submissions

When you submit code after the deadline, we will grade you twice. Once on what work you did submit before the deadline, and once what you did after the deadline. However, we will cap the grade from after the deadline at a 6.0.

Labs

Every week (on Thursdays) there will be lab sessions with TAs. In these lab sessions you can ask questions and discuss problems you are having.

Lecture notes

Each lecture will have an associated document with an explanation of what is discussed in the slides. This document will be published under lecture notes. We call these the lecture notes. You can use these to study ahead (before the lecture) which we recommend, so you can ask more specific questions in the lectures. And we do invite you to ask lots of questions! However, in the case you could not make it to a lecture, it should also give you a lot of the information covered in the lectures in writing.

All lecture slides are also published here

Advent of Code

During this course, there will be the yearly advent of code. Every day, a new programming challenge is published, getting harder every day. It's quite fun, and great practice if you haven't been programming for that long yet! There is a course leaderboard with ID (356604-2d88ced0).

Note: this is just for fun. It's not mandatory at all.