Lehigh University Offering Course On Software Engineering Focusing on MozillaThursday February 3rd, 2000Rob Latham writes, "Lehigh University is using Mozilla and the related tools to teach software engineering. The 100 or so students in ECE 216: Software Engineering will have to build the lizard on Win32 and Linux, file at least one good bug report (hopefully with a fix) with bugzilla, and generally throw a lot of eyeballs at this project." The site describes more about its use of Mozilla on their Links page. This is the second school to do this, West Virginia University being the first. I hope more universities consider making Moz the subject of software engineering classes. What a great way to introduce students to a large-scale project. So much is open to the public, and there are many different subareas of the project for students to focus on. If a department at your school offers a Mozilla class, let us know! This is going to sound like a disparaging comment, I know, but please don't take it that way... I hope that these college courses aren't blind to the realities of the Mozilla project -- most importantly, that Mozilla has taken over two years to get where it is today, and it has several more months to go. This is due in part to its experimental nature, and the fact that it was a very new idea to open the source to a proprietary product. I could say more biased things, naturally, but JWZ said them (and he has much more right to say them than I do). Point is, much of software engineering isn't about the code at all, but is about the process and the people. The Rational Unified Process, for example, on which many companies' development processes are based, talks more about managing people as they pertain to development cycles. So my hope is that one of the results of this sort of college course is a well-defined process for efficient and solid development of large-scale open source projects. Don't worry, your comment didn't sound disparaging. I'm just that class TA, so I can't speak for the instructor *per se*, but I know him pretty well, so I'll post this comment anyway. (I'm pretty sure that he'd agree with me, but I don't like to speak on someone elses behalf, so I'm making this disclaimer). As you know, part of understanding what software engineering is really all about it getting involved (somehow) on a large project. Mozilla fits this bill quite nicely. It's a moving target, open source, and an exciting project (for students or otherwise) to work on. I agree that SoftE isn't all about coding. But neither is Mozilla. Perhaps the title of the article is a bit misleading. The focus of this class is not Mozilla; it's Software Engineering. We just happen to be using Mozilla to help teach it. Hope this puts some minds at ease. ;) Don't worry, your comment didn't sound disparaging. I'm just that class TA, so I can't speak for the instructor *per se*, but I know him pretty well, so I'll post this comment anyway. Part of understanding what software engineering is all about it getting involved (somehow) on a large project. Mozilla fits this bill quite nicely. It's a moving target, open source, and an exciting project (for students or otherwise) to work on. I agree that SoftE isn't all about coding. But neither is Mozilla. Perhaps the title of the article is a bit misleading. The focus of this class is not Mozilla; it's Software Engineering. We just happen to be using Mozilla to help teach it. I think you spelled Virginia wrong. |