Computer science course simulates real world

Computer science course simulates real world

BY KATHERINE MANUEL
Special to the Rice News

When Stephen Wong, lecturer on computer science, plans his spring semester course “Software Engineering Methodology,” commonly known as “COMP 410,” he carefully orchestrates a real-world experience from behind the scenes. He hand-selects the semester-long project, which always requires the class to develop new technology using an unfamiliar programming language for the “client,” played by Dung “Zung” Nguyen, lecturer on computer science.

The 14-week experience is meant to simulate the actual world of software engineering, where computer scientists are required to achieve the impossible on a daily basis with no help from textbooks. Wong said the goal of COMP 410 is “to push students past what they think they can do so they leave the class fearless.”

This fall for the first time, a follow-up class has been added to the computer science offerings: “Real-World Software Development” (COMP 415). If COMP 410 is the TV show “The Real World” of software engineering, COMP 415 is “The Apprentice” of academia. In this course, the client is played by Adam Stauffer, chief technology officer of HBK Investments in Dallas. HBK plans to use the students’ project, a simulation stock exchange they created from scratch, to test production systems in the future.

COMP 415 gives the phrase “real-life application” new meaning.

“Now we have a real customer,” Wong told his six COMP 415 students this fall. “Let’s do it for real this time.”

Unlike COMP 410, where Wong contrives obstacles for students, COMP 415’s real customer naturally creates more challenges than Wong himself could contrive. “The biggest obstacle was learning that we had to interact with a real customer,” said Angela Wise, a Will Rice College senior. “This wasn’t Dr. Nguyen, who knew what was up before any customer meetings because Dr. Wong had already filled him in. If we didn’t take the initiative to communicate with the customer, things couldn’t happen.”

Unlike the TV show “The Apprentice,” no one will actually get fired over the course of the semester; however, students do have regular conference calls with HBK, and they recently met Stauffer in a boardroom in Dallas to present their progress and do a demonstration of the system they have built.

“We’ve had a great time working with the team,” Stauffer said. “They put together a prototype quickly and we have been improving it throughout the semester.”

HBK Investments approached Wong last year about getting more involved in the computer science department. “We’ve had great success recruiting from the department and want to continue the trend,” Stauffer said. “Finance is not an obvious first-choice career for computer science grads, and all of the big players [Google, Microsoft, etc.] are very active on campus. We wanted to demonstrate that there are interesting technology problems in the financial industry too, and that there are great employment alternatives right here in Texas.”

Once Wong presents the project to students, he steps back and allows them to figure out how to achieve their goal and make the client happy. The students must determine how to organize themselves and break down the task, and they must teach themselves the necessary technology skills to achieve their goal.

Meanwhile, Wong monitors their activities from behind the scenes. He gives them the opportunity to fail because, as he puts it, “it’s the experience of failure that they remember.”

For instance, Wong said, in past 410 classes, students have tried using a flat organizational structure rather than creating a hierarchy of specific task managers. Inevitably, students quickly realize they need more structure in the decision-making process. Wong said, “A student came to me one semester and said, ‘This isn’t going so well. … I think we need a project manager.’”

Wise, who is the project manager this semester, described how COMP 415 differs from the typical college course: “Unlike most classes, no one has done this project before, so there is no right answer,” she said. “We need to set the deliverables and specifications ourselves; we need to come up with schedules ourselves. Nothing is laid out for us. It’s programming like a real person — not like a student.”

Stauffer said Wong’s goal is to allow the students to have a real-life software-development experience. “I hope in the process the students have learned a bit more about requirements gathering, teamwork on a large software project, communicating their ideas to each other and to customers and, of course, building technology that works in the real world,” he said. “I think courses like this one fill an important gap in the U.S. undergraduate computer science curriculum, and I hope that other industrial partners come forward to help better prepare our next generation of technologists for the workforce.”
Wong said Rice graduates get the best jobs in the industry and become leaders in their fields. “As leaders, they will go on to determine what software practices they’ll be using,” he said.

To make those decisions, they have to experience it firsthand. “They need to see it, feel it, taste it, sweat it,” he said.
COMP 410 and 415 force students to do just that.

—Katherine Manuel is the external relations coordinator and editor for the Department of Computer Science.