Bachelor-Praktikum: Simulation of a real-life Software Development project - Connecting the R language to the Clouds.

Miriam Schmidberger, schmidbm. ( at ) .in.tum.de
Dr. Markus Schmidberger, schmidb. ( at ) .rostlab.org

organized in cooperation by Rostlab and Chair for Applied Software Engineering at TUM.

Cloud ressources are provided by Amazon! 

Dates

Informative / preliminary meeting:

Preliminary talks (obligatory):

  • Two days in the lecture time:
  • 05. May 2011: Scrum Workshop
  • 12. May 2011: Requirements Engineering & Technical Basics

Practical in two weeks (obligatory):

  • after the lecture time: 1. - 12. August 2011 (without weekend)

Content

In this practical an academic software project using Cloud Computing will be developed with Scrum as software engineering method. By participating in this project you will gain experience in developing software in a real-life setting due to the two weeks full-time development cycle: From customer idea to software release.

In preparation for the actual software development two workshops are mandatory to attend. One will give you an introduction to R and the other to the software engineering technique that will be used (most likely Scrum).

The academic software project:

R is a statistical programming language and very common for many kind of data analyses. Due to growing data and more and more complex applications computation time and computing resources are the limiting factor for efficient research. Cloud computing provides resources on demand and is a cost efficient way to extend computing power. So far there is no satisfying interface for R to the Clouds. An efficient interface has to work with different cloud infrastructures, provide a simple user interface from the R command line and guarantee a correct operation to omit unwanted costs. A catalog of requirements for a new R package and the cloud image will be provided and the fitting software has to be developed by the students. Furthermore, the implementations will be evaluated with real life examples to demonstrate the usability of cloud computing for computational statistics and data driven analyses.

Organization

  • Basic concepts of Software Engineering, R programming and Cloud computing will be taught in preliminary talks. This will take about two days.
  • At the first day of the practical the finale software requirements will be published.
  • Than the groups have to implement, document, test and evaluate the required software. Basic infrastructure (e.g. SVN) will be provided.
  • At the last day of the practical the software has to be presented and handed over at noon.
  • Finally, every student has to write a practical report in form of an JSS paper.

Target audience

This practical is designed for Bachelor Informatik students: Bachelor-Praktikum (6 SWS, 10 ECTS.

Students from other study programs are invited too. But you have to ask your study adviser for the course acceptance!

  • Bachelor Bioinformatik (not yet accepted as practical)
  • Bachelor Mathematik (Nebenfach, 8 ECTS)
  • Bachelor Wirtschaftsinformatik

Registration

closed

Language

English

Previous knowledge expected

No, basic knowledge of software engineering and the R language are an advantage