CS257 Software Design
Monday, 31 March 2025

+ Welcome!
- I'm Jeff. Olin 301A. jondich.
- Office hours posted on course website
- Meet each other

+ What makes software good?
--- Student responses ---
Well commented
Features that do what I want
Easy to find the features
Able to be maintained
    well documented
    well styled
Accessible
Layout in code and UI
Security
Efficient performance
Doesn't have unintended consequences
Pretty
Open source
-------------------------

+ Examples of real software that
- Makes people's lives better
    - Texting
    - Password manager
    - FaceTime
    - Photos
    - TurboTax      [JO has doubts]
    - Excel
- Makes people's lives worse
    - Tracking people for ad targeting
    - Confusing UIs (e.g., the Mayo Clinic
        app & website)
    - Workday
    
- (whose lives?)

+ Go back through that list
Example 1: Apple Photos, Google Photos
- Who is this software for?
    people with the right hardware
    Jo Average
    people who can see photos
    shareholders?
    workers?
    programmers?
- Does the software serve everyone equally well?
    people with fancier hardware get fancier photos
    need internet access/broadband to use cloud storage
    money for storage
    Apple Photos tries to drive you towards more
        Apple purchases; Google similarly
    automatic face recognition still recognizes
        lighter-skinned faces better than darker

etc.


+ Software engineering vs. programming
- Programming
    - ?
- Software engineering
    - code is part of a larger system
    - teams
    - many stakeholders whose needs/demands are relevant
    - safety, security
    ...
- 1960s
    - Fred Brooks, IBM's System 360
    - Margaret Hamilton, NASA's Apollo program
    - ...many others...
    - (be wary of attempts to identify "the person" who invented a thing)

+ This course
- Focus your design and implementation of software on the needs of human beings
- Improve your ability to build high-quality software
    (and to understand what that even means)
- Improve your independence as a programmer
    - get more comfortable with essential tools
    - get more comfortable with essential processes
    - practice solving day-to-day programming problems
- Some of your concrete tasks
    - set up and maintain your development system
    - work with a team
    - design and build a data-driven web application
    - incorporate ethical analysis into your designs and implementations throughout

+ Logistics
- Quick tour of the course website
- No Moodle
- Laptops in classroom strongly encouraged
- Different backgrounds

+ This week
- Get set up
- Brainstorm needs and possible applications
- Meet Unix, git, and GitHub

+ Next week
- Command-line interface design and implementation
- Test-driven development and unit tests

+ The elephant in the room: LLMs
- My stance and experience (so far)
- What do you think? (so far)
- We need to collaborate

+ First job
- Initial setup for your computer (see ASSIGNMENT due tomorrow)


=========

Jeff's short list
- Correct
- Meets the needs of people it's intended for
- Maintainable

==== Fall 2022 students: what makes software good? ====
- Readability of source code
- Documentation
- Ethical purpose
- Easy to debug
- Functionality
- Efficiency
- Easy-to-use UI
- Fills an actual need
- Functionality for edge cases
- Security
    - [don't let users mess with code]
- Transparent: what is this sw doing?