Software Engineering

This course examines the role of computers and software and their impact on society. It discusses Ethical Foundations for IT professional and IT users; Governance, Regulations, and Computer and Internet Crimes; Intellectual Property; Privacy; Security; Professional Responsibility from the perspective of software engineering and the local and regional laws and regulations.

This course is designed to present students with several principles relevant to Software Engineering. Students will gain insights into various software process models throughout the course. The curriculum strongly emphasizes the agile software development approach, highlighting the importance of adaptability and collaborative teamwork. Students will acquire knowledge and skills in requirements engineering. The course covers systems modeling and project management strategies. It addresses the value of software reuse and introduces students to human computer interaction and software testing. The final segment of the course focuses on configuration management.

Introducing key aspects of the requirements process, starting with the creation of a vision document, and establishing project scope. Elicitation techniques, system context and use case modeling, and the seamless transition from use cases to implementation and test cases will be introduced. Crucial topics will be covered like misuse case modeling, prototyping, fundamentals of goal orientation, requirements management, change management, and the creation and validation of supplementary specifications.

This course introduces the fundamentals of function, design, and implementation of computer/mobile operating systems. Students will learn processes, threads, concurrent programming, interrupt handling, CPU scheduling and process synchronization, memory management, deadlocks, and file system.

This course is designed to provide students with technical knowledge and skills to build Internet of Things (IoT) systems and applications. The course will cover the design of microcontroller-based embedded systems. In addition, it will cover IoT paradigms, including the integration of various components such as sensors, actuators, and communication modules, IoT design considerations, constraints, and development processes for IoT applications in different sectors. 

The course focuses on learning fundamentals of Web-based programming techniques, Web application development and client-server database integration. It provides in-depth coverage of introductory programming principles, various markup languages, client-side scripting, server-side scripting and relational databases. The course also introduces sessions, cookies, and the application of XML in web building. 

The purpose of the course is to provide the students with an overview of the field of Cyber Security. Students will be exposed to a wide spectrum of security techniques used to protect information assets, manage risk, and detect and react to threats to information assets. In this module, students will learn about data/system/network protection mechanisms, intrusion detection systems, models of security, cryptography, hashing, authentication and non-repudiation, network system security, attack strategies, malware, secure applications (development), and cyber-security policy.  

An internship it is an important aspect of Software Engineering curriculum that provides the student with hands-on experience and a good sense of what an actual job in an organization will be like. Students are required to join an IT department in a government or private organization for a summer period of at least 8 weeks in the last summer prior to student graduation. Students should be able to relate the internship experience to the knowledge that he or she has gained through the Software Engineering program courses.

This course introduces principles and techniques to develop software such that it is more maintainable and evolvable. This implies that the developed software is traceable, easy to understand, and ready for change. Such qualities are necessary for all software which will have a considerable lifespan and would have additions/changes in their functionality during their lifetimes. The course will discuss the most common design patterns which help in making a software more robust. 

Software reengineering will also be introduced since many of the largest software systems are successors of existing systems and in the absence of clear documentation, most of the time, functional details and design choices have to be extracted from existing code.  

The course will also introduce the concept of functional programming, its differences with imperative programming languages, its uses  and its pitfalls. Understanding of functional programming will help students explore a new programming paradigm and broaden their horizon

Students participate in supervised research with a faculty member. Supervised research can be: 1) independent research undertaken by the student (thesis, independent study), or 2) assistance on a faculty member’s research project. Students must find a faculty member who is willing to supervise him/her as an assistant on an existing project or as the author of an individual project. The student and the faculty supervisor will complete and sign a research contract which will be submitted to the chair of the Software Engineering Department. Drafting the contract will allow the student to develop ideas about what should be accomplished and understand the scope and expectations of the faculty supervisor.

This course prepares students to gather, describe, and analyze data, and use advanced statistical tools to make decisions on operations, risk management, finance, marketing, etc. Analysis is done targeting economic and financial decisions in complex systems that involve multiple partners. Topics include probability, statistics, hypothesis testing, regression, clustering, decision trees, and forecasting. 

This course is an introduction to the basic concepts and mechanisms of applied cryptography and data security. It will cover both cryptographic primitives (symmetric encryption, public encryption, MACs, Digital Signatures, Authenticated Encryption, etc.) to cope with the data confidentiality and data integrity. It also emphasizes on how to apply and implement cryptography in practice. 

This course provides a foundation for building secure software by applying security principles to the software development lifecycle. Topics covered include security in requirements engineering, secure designs, risk analysis, threat modeling, deploying cryptographic algorithms, defensive coding, penetration testing, fuzzing, static analysis, and security assessment. Students will learn the practical skills for developing and testing for secure software while also learning sound security fundamentals from real-world case studies.

This course addresses security issues for TCP/IP-based and NT networks. Access Control and Communications Security issues will be covered as well as Internet and intranet security.

 This course provides an overview of the fields of IT Security and Risk Management. IT Security and Risk Management are concerned with threats to the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) of information systems. Risk management comprises a set of coordinated activities to direct and control an organization regarding risk. This course will explore how IT Security and Risk Management intersect with the management of records and information in digital environments and will address the application of IT Security and Risk Management theories, principles, and techniques to the management records and information-related risks.

The course will start with an analysis of various vulnerabilities in an application, system/device or a network protocol (or network) which can be exploited to threaten the data and services of a software system. Using these vulnerabilities, students will learn how to collect information before the attack, gain access, retrieve useful information, keep the access for a period of time, and avoid leaving traces of the attack. Countermeasures for each of the vulnerabilities explored will also be discussed. Students will also learn how to assess the security state of an application/system/network based on the vulnerabilities present in it. The course will include both theoretical and practical aspects: concepts learned in the lectures will be practiced in a closed environment using virtual machines. 

This is the second part of the capstone project started in SE 495 course. In this part, students develop a software solution based on the low-level design which was produced as a part of SE 495. This includes implementation, testing, managing, and evaluating their final product. Student teams must deliver the executable code, a final report, and present and demonstrate their software solution.