DALMINE
Overview
Date/time interval
Syllabus
Course Objectives
At the end of the module, students will acquire theoretical and practical knowledge of methods, tools, and technologies for designing and implementing distributed software applications, both “in the large” and “in the small”. In particular, the module addresses: agile development processes; software architecture design, documentation, and analysis; component- and service-oriented development; principles for designing APIs and distributed architectures; the effective use of algorithms and data structures; UML modelling; object-oriented programming with Java; and the use of development environments, frameworks, plug-ins, and supporting technologies for building and testing modular, maintainable, and scalable software systems.
The module also introduces the main evolutions of modern software architectures, with particular attention to distributed systems based on services, microservices, and intelligent components. In perspective, it also discusses the principles underlying agentic architectures, where autonomous software components or AI/LLM-based agents can plan, interact with tools, coordinate with other services or agents, and contribute to the execution of complex software workflows.
Course Prerequisites
Teaching Methods
Theoretical lectures and hands-on laboratory sessions.
Assessment Methods
The written test is divided into two parts. The first part includes 4 open-ended questions on "Design and algorithms" (duration of an hour and a half), while the second part includes a questionnaire (multiple choice and one open-ended) on "Computability" (duration 30 minutes). Only those obtaining a score higher than 18/30 are admitted to the oral exam. The oral exam consists in the presentation and discussion of an software project, which can also be developed in small groups of 2-3 students, and is considered passed with a score higher than 18/30.
The final score of the entire integrated course of "ADVANCED PROGRAMMING + DESIGN, ALGORITHMS AND COMPUTABILITY", which this module belongs to, is given by the weighted average of the marks obtained in the two modules.
In order to ensure the effective organization and management of examination sessions, the lecturer may apply the so-called “skipping of the immediately following exam session” to students who have received a severely insufficient grade or who, after registering for the exam, are absent without justification.
Contents
**Coarse grained design**: Software architecture and API-based design and analysis. Topics: agile development processes, AMDD, requirements manipulation and use case modeling, SW architecture design in UML, SW architecture quality analysis (relyability and availability), architectural design patterns/styles (adaptive, IoT-Cloud-based, (micro-)service-oriented, and agent-based), graphical UIs for Java/Android destop/mobile applications, API-based development with REST, unit testing and API testing of software applications, tools for SW metrics and static analysis. **Fine grained design**: Detailed analysis of each component and definiton of algorithms. Topics: Introduction to algorithms and data structures, development cycle of an algorithm, algorith complexity and asymptotic notation, guidelines for implementing algorithms and abstract data types in Java, basic data structure and algorithms (list, stack, queue), order algorithms, tree data types, research trees (binary research trees, B-trees, red-black trees), application of tree data types to manipulate XML documents, hash tables, graphs representation and traversals, graph minimum paths, design methodologies for algorithms (incremental,divide-et-impera,greedy,dynamic programming). ** Computability **: Computability theory: fundamental concepts and theorems; Turing machines; deterministic and non-deterministic computing.