In case of questions, please contact us via e-mail to: sopra@lists.se.cs.uni-saarland.de.

 

About the Software Engineering Lab

Passing the course "Programming 2" is a mandatory prerequisite for participation in the Software Engineering Lab!

The Chair of Software Engineering offers a Software Engineering Lab (SE Lab), formerly Software-Praktikum (SoPra), in the form of a basic block course during the lecture-free period, which addresses students currently enrolled in a Bachelor’s degree program majoring and minoring in computer science. The goal of the Software Engineering Lab is to develop a non-trivial software system in Kotlin in a group effort. Other characteristics of the Software Engineering Lab are:

• Time period: 17.08.2026 – 02.10.2026

• Duration: 7 weeks (daily Monday to Friday)

• The Software Engineering Lab consists of two phases:

  • Exercise phase (~1 week): Daily lectures (beginning at 09:30) and exercises in the afternoon. At the end of the first week, on Friday, 21.08.2026, an entry exam will take place. Only participants that pass the entry exam will be admitted to the group phase.

  • Group phase (~6 weeks): Design, implementation, and testing of a substantial software system in a team effort (in teams of five to seven students). Only participants that have passed the exercise phase are admitted to the group phase.

• Compulsory Attendance: During the group phase, compulsory attendance is required between 10:00 and 16:00 (at days with lectures between 11:00 and 16:00). There will be three additional appointments between 09:00 and 18:00. To accommodate students with minijobs, the attendance requirement is lifted for one day per week in the Software Engineering Lab. By default, this day is Tuesday, but groups may select a different day. The chosen day must be communicated to the tutor at the start of the group phase. We will attempt to schedule mandatory sessions outside of your chosen day, but we can not guarantee it. You may need to attend at least part of the day. Out of the seven weeks, around one and a half weeks—including the seventh week—are allocated for the re-evaluation of students or groups who fail submissions, during which compulsory attendance is waived, too.

In exceptional cases, in which you are not able to fulfill the compulsory attendance on single days of the group phase, please inform your tutor during the course. We then will take a hardship decision about the attendance for individual days, which may also be dependent on your project progress, if necessary.
If a group fulfills all requirements for passing the group phase, we will waive the compulsory attendance for this group. 

• More details about the time slots and dates of the lectures and the concrete temporal sequence of the Software Engineering Lab are available in the schedule presumably in the end of July.

The Software Engineering Lab will take place on-site at the campus.

Upon registration in the CMS, you will be asked for your preferred language (English or German). We try to use this information for the tutorial assignment in the exercise phase, if possible (but without guarantee; the default language is English). Your decision in the CMS helps us to prepare the course.

We will upload a file covering organizational matters in the week before the SE Lab starts, in which we provide further information on the schedule of the course.

 

Prerequisites

Passing the course "Programming 2" is a mandatory prerequisite for participation in the Software Engineering Lab!

Participation in the Software Engineering Lab requires programming skills as taught in the courses Programming 1 and Programming 2.
Students are required to bring their own laptops.

 

Registration

Registration for the Software Engineering Lab here in the CMS is possible from 06.07.2026.
Two registrations are necessary for participation in the Software Engineering Lab:

1. You have to register here in the CMS by 17.08.2026.

2. You have to register at your examinations office by 24.08.2026 (for most degree programs in computer science, this is possible via the LSF; note that the course is sometimes called ‘Softwaredesignpraktikum’ there). There you can also withdraw your registration until 24.08.2026. The LSF registration opens on 03.08.2026 and is only possible after a passing grade for the course "Programming 2" has been entered in your LSF records.
   For students who cannot register in the LSF because their course of studies does not use the LSF: You have to provide a certificate to us that confirms that you have passed "Programming 2", within the time period of the LSF registration.

 

Contents

• Software design
• Software testing
• Team work
• Debugging

 

Literature

• Software Engineering. I. Sommerville. Addison-Wesley, 2004.
• Software Engineering: A Practioner's Approach. R. Pressman. McGraw Hill Text, 2001.
• Using UML: Software Engineering with Objects and Components. P. Stevens, R. Pooley. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
• UML Distilled. M. Fowler, K. Scott. Addison-Wesley, 2000.
• Objects, Components and Frameworks with UML, D. D'Souza, A. Wills. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
• Designing Object-Oriented Software. R. Wirfs-Brock, B. Wilkerson, L. Wiener. Prentice Hall, 1990.
• Design Patterns. Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, J. Vlissides. Addison Wesley, 1995.
• Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: A System of Patterns. F. Buschmann, R. Meunier, H. Rohnert, P. Sommerlad, M. Stal. Wiley, 1996.
• Head First Design Patterns. E. Freeman, E. Robson, K. Sierra, B. Bates. O’Reilly, 2004.
• Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline. M. Shaw, D. Garlan. Prentice-Hall, 1996.
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. M. Fowler, K. Beck, W. Opdyke. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
• Software Testing and Analysis: Process, Principles and Techniques. M. Pezze. Wiley. 2007.