Unit 6: Software Design and Development

Week 6: Part 1 - Design Principles

  • P5: explain the role of software design principles and software structures in the IT systems development lifecycle
    • Development Lifecycles: stages eg determination of scope, requirements gathering and specification, design, code, test, maintain
    • Design Principles: No content!
    • Software Structures: functions, procedures, classes and objects; abstraction of data; pre-defined code (inheritance)
  • M1 Explain the importance of the quality of code
    • quality of code eg efficiency, reliability, robustness, usability, portability, maintainability
  • D1 Discuss the factors that can improve the readability of code
    • readability eg comments, appropriate names for variables, indentation;

The simplest approach to developing a teaching session is to create a PowerPoint presentation with added notes. The slides should contain the essential points, and the notes should expand on the points and add relevant examples.

In my opinion this is a poorly defined topic as there is no guidance on what should be covered as Design Principles, and the term Software Structures is not one used in the industry. I believe you should talk about Software Architecture, Object-Orientation and Data Structures.

Lesson Activities

  1. 10min Tutor: Explain the new structuring of resources and lesson plans.
  2. 10 min Tutor: Introduce and explain Assessment 2 - Application Design
  3. 20 min Students: Complete a quiz on the C# Programming Fundamentals
  4. 10 min Tutor Record Results, and get/give feedback
  5. 30 min Students Individual research on P5, making short notes on the points to include for all three sub-topics
  6. 10 min Tutor Divide students into pairs, and then join pairs to make a team of four.

Useful Resources

Explore the resources listed on Unit 6 Criteria page