As Martin Fowler wrote in his famous blog post, Flaccid Scrum, many Agile Software Development efforts fail, because they do not adopt Agile Engineering practices, which are not covered by the Scrum methodology. Agile Engineering practices allow teams to accommodate frequent changes, while still delivering code that is low in bugs, and deployable at the end of each sprint.

This course goes beyond an academic discussion of Object-Oriented Design and goes into a deep discussion of its effects on practical software engineering concerns such as maintainability, testability and reuse. The course then proceeds to discuss critical Java best practices which affect performance and correctness. This is followed by a discussion on modern software engineering approaches of Test-Driven Development and Refactoring, which improve the quality and maintainability of the codebase.

Students are provided with numerous hands-on exercises, the most challenging of which is the final team machine problem, which includes changes to requirements mid-way!