TDDC18 Component Based Software

Mid-term evaluation 18/4/2007

The course was mid-term-evaluated by the muddy card method on wednesday 18/4/2007 during the fifth lecture, that is, at the beginning of the third week.
About 20 students were attending this lecture, and I received 14 cards.

Positive issues:

• Interesting topic

• Good overall quality (2)

• Clear and structured lectures, well presented (3)

• Right level of abstraction, theoretical concepts (2)

• Lesson on Java Reflection (5): quite difficult but good and really interesting

• Comprehensive powerpoint slides, available on the web

Negative issues:

• Many of the topics presented seem very abstract

• Some of the topics presented are too basic for the level of the course

• Sometimes too slow / too much repetition in the lectures (3)

• Too much text on the slides, focus more

• No labs (5)
  Comment: Due to budget restrictions, there are no supervised labs in this course.
  We give suggestions for optional practical exercises so you can practise on your own, e.g. at home.

• Schedule clashes with other courses

• Too many muddy-cards
  Comment: In this year, our course participates in an experimental study about course evaluations by the studierektor. Hence the numerical evaluations that we have 4 times in total, in addition to the ordinary mid-term evaluation of today.

Suggestions for improvement:

• More practical examples, not just the theory (2)
  Comment: By now we have covered most of the general part of the course, and will from now on focus on specific component systems with more technical issues. There will be more practical examples in the lectures to come.

• Add labs (4)
  Comment: see below.

Conclusion

By and large, the course seems to run well. There are two major concerns, more concrete examples in the lectures, and the non-existence of (mandatory, supervised) labs.

As we are now more or less finished with the basic concepts, more concrete examples will follow in the next lectures where concrete component systems will be presented.

The lack of labs is an issue that comes again every year.
Development and maintenance of labs requires much work and also continuous updating (tools, lab skeletons, documentation) in a field where technology is evolving rapidly. At the moment, undergraduate education is in a difficult budget situation, and we do not have the human and financial resources to do extensive development.
(Actually, in 2005 we had already applied for lab development resources at the D board which owns the course, but got rejected. An already granted small internal lab development resource for 2007 was withdrawn by the studierektor when the size of the undergraduate education budget deficit for this year became known. At the moment there is not much hope that the economic situation will change in the next years.)

Note that there are optional, unsupervised programming assignments for self-studies suggested on the course homepage, see the exercises page.

Thank you very much for your comments!

Christoph Kessler