TDDD05 Component Based Software

Mid-term evaluation 2009

The course was mid-term-evaluated by the muddy card method on friday 24/4/2009 before the break in the eigth lecture (CORBA CCM, SOA), that is, at the end of the third week (and after the two-weeks easter break). About 30 students attended the lecture, and I received 23 cards.
Below I summarize the feedback and comment on selected issues.

Organization

• Good structure
• Three lectures in a week is too much. / Dislike lectures at 08:00 in the morning.
  Comment: We have no choice. The schedule frame is given by the central administration.
• Labs should be mandatory. (2) /
  Labs should remain optional. (3) /
  Lab bonus should have higher weight in the exam (2)
• Would prefer a project instead of labs.
• Informative course web page

Contents

• Interesting / relevant / profound topics / contents (10)
• Too much contents, too difficult to understand, should be reduced (3)
• Too much focus on CORBA (1)
  Comment: CORBA is the first case study of a real-world component system, combines many previously introduced concepts, and is also used in industry.
  Introducing the concepts for the first time (at the example of CORBA) takes some time, but when later relating features of other component systems to the corresponding ones in CORBA, these other systems can be described faster.
• This is the third course about CORBA in this semester... (1)
  Comment: Some overlap across courses is unavoidable. Our course is given for many different study programs, some of which also include, e.g., a course on Distributed Systems, while others do not. CORBA is central to our course, we have to take it up anyway.
• Complete source code examples should be given on the course homepage.
• Showing code is unnecessary; it should be a pure theory course.
• Unclear what we need to read for passing the exam and what can be skipped.

Lectures

• Slides well prepared and organized (2)
• Good lectures. (5)
• Too fast. (1)
• Too slow. (1)
• Hard to follow / somewhat complicated (2)
• Should be more interactive (2)
• There should be fewer lectures (1)
• There should be less details on the slides. (1)
• There should be more details on the slides. (1)
• Too much contents per lecture (1)
  There should be more examples on the slides. (1)

Labs

• Good / Interesting labs - practical work, complement the theory part well (7)
• Labs are tough (1)
• Takes us many hours, should give more points (2)
• [...] everybody knows Java. (1) /
  Labs are difficult if you don't know Java. (2)
• Nobody told us that the lab lesson was mission critical. (1)
• Too little structure in lab instructions /
  Lab assignment should be better documented. For the first lab we were only told [...] orally [what to do], so we missed important points. (4)
  Comment: We have put the lesson slides and (most of) lab 1 assignment on the course web page on the day after the lesson. Remaining labs will be documented better.

Conclusion

By and large, the course seems to run well.

Regarding focus on CORBA, see the remarks above.

Regarding the issue of optional vs. mandatory labs, we will also have just this question in the final course evaluation by the faculty, which should help us in deciding about labs for 2010.

The remaining lab assignments will be documented completely on the lab page.

Thanks a lot for your comments!

Christoph Kessler