Team software development projet - KAIN6M14

Goal(s)

The project brings into play the theoretical and practical skills acquired in Year 3, and involves developing software over a 3-week period on a full-time basis in teams of 5 or 6 students.

The aim of this course is to

• reinforce acquired skills
• illustrate the concepts of project management and software engineering
• expose students who are used to structured practical work to the challenge of designing a complete software program in a freer environment
• a significant part of the project is devoted to presentations by an external consultant (E.Dufour) on team management, cooperation and conflict resolution.

Content(s)

The framework imposed is the realization of a physical simulator with multiple interacting objects. This theme covers a wide range of computer applications in various fields.

To motivate the students, the subject takes the concrete form of a game engine.
The theme of the game is left open, but the engine must respect the following constraints:

• The behavior of each active entity is defined by an automaton.
• Automata, characters and scenery are described in a file, which requires the use of a parser to import them into the engine.
• Design follows the MVC pattern (model, view, controller)
• the engine is event-driven: a single task manages interactions (keyboard, mouse), the graphical interface and physical model updates
• The scheduling of entity activation must guarantee fluid and fair simulation of active elements.

The project provides an introduction to software engineering through

• the use of a version management system ;
• the importance of software architecture;
• the role of integration tests;
• the role of interfaces in breaking down tasks;
• producing developer/user documentation;
• preparing a demo.

The project comprises 2 phases:

• 1st week: brainstorming, prototyping, project presentation, drawing up a contract.
• 2nd and 3rd weeks: development, presentation and demonstration, evaluation.

Having taken the courses of year 3 in imperative and object-oriented programming, automata and syntactic analysis is required