An often-cited problem in undergraduate software engineering courses states that some of the topics are difficult to expose in a university setting and, although laboratory work is a useful supplement to the lectures, it is very difficult to make projects realistic and relevant. In recognition of that problem, and based on the shortcomings of our approach in the past, we started preparing a new course by examining the pedagogies and aspects of real world software projects that are relevant for our educational objectives. The course project described in this paper concentrates on a few aspects that can be effectively dealt with within the environment, i.e., the software lifecycle, teamwork, system interdependences, and realistic yet manageable project dynamics and uncertainties. In addition, the workload per students must be fair, such that they can manage with absence of the prerequisites from their knowledge and skills, and their unpreparedness to deal with complex issues. The approach has been tested on six large projects. We believe that the results not only reflect the strong interest and commitment by the students, but also demonstrate their ability to stay focused and work at a level that is well above the obvious.

Software engineering has evolved, over a short period of time, into a dominant and omnipresent industry. In education we have recognized the importance of both managerial and technical aspects, but often failed to organize them in a coherent course with a relevant, if not realistic laboratory project. The problem is far-reaching, and should be dealt with accordingly. This paper presents our before and after findings, and elaborates on CPE 207, the new Software Engineering course that, in our opinion, helps in bridging the gap between university and industry.

This paper presents Visper, a novel object-oriented framework that identifies and enhances common services and programming primitives, and implements a generic set of classes applicable to multiple programming models in a distributed environment. Groups of objects, which can be programmed in a uniform and transparent manner, and agent-based distributed system management, are also featured in Visper. A prototype system is designed and implemented in Java, with a number of visual utilities that facilitate program development and portability. As a use case, Visper integrates parallel programming in an MPI-like message-passing paradigm at a high level with services such as checkpointing and fault tolerance at a lower level. The paper reports a range of performance evaluation on the prototype and compares it to related works.

We present here our work aimed at developing an open, network based visual software engineering environment for parallel processing called Visper. It is completely implemented in Java and supports the message-passing model. Java offers the basic platform independent services needed to integrate heterogeneous hardware into a seamless computational resource. Easy installation, participation and flexibility are seen as key properties when using the system. We believe the approach taken simplifies the development and testing of parallel programs by enabling modular, object oriented technique based on our extensions to the Java API. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

As an objected-oriented programming language and a platform-independent environment, Java has been attracting much attention. However, the trade-off between portability and performance has not spared Java. The initial performance of Java programs has been poor, due to the interpretive nature of the environment. In this paper we present the communication performance results of three different types of message-passing programs: native, Java and native communications, and pure Java. Despite concerns about performance and numerical issues, we believe the obtained results confirm that high-performance parallel computing in Java is possible, as the technology matures and the approach is pragmatic.Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The attractiveness of visual programming stems in large part from the direct interaction with program elements as if they were real objects, since people deal better with concrete objects than with the abstract. This paper describes a new graph based software visualization tool for parallel message-passing programming named Visper that combines the levels of abstraction at which message-passing parallel programs are expressed and makes use of compositional programming. Central to the tool is the Process Communication Graph that correlates both the control and data flow graphs into a single graph formalism, without a need for complex textual annotation. The graph can express static and runtime communication and replication structures, as found in Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). It also forms the basis for visualizing parallel debugging and performance.