Snapshot from CS456/556 (Engineering) – A Writing-Enriched Course
By: Dr. Chang Liu

There is a significant writing component (more than 25%). The emphasis is on producing useful documents through peer-reviews and multiple revisions.

For example, one individual homework assignment is to write a review for a new technology that is used in team projects. Students are required to produce the document in three steps: 1) an overview and a "getting started" section that contains a simple example; 2) a tutorial with more in-depth examples; 3) a "quick reference card"-type document that summarizes common usage of the technology-under-review. Students are required to make their documents public at each step so that other students can use their reviews to learn the new technologies as well as provide feedback. (There are more than ten technologies under review. One student only reviews one technology. When he/she needs to use other technologies in the projects, he/she can use the help of the reviews produced by other students.) In addition, for the second and third steps, which take weeks to complete, students are required to release multiple versions of drafts in between so that they can get feedback from other students.

Most other assignments, both individual ones and team ones, involve writing as well. Peer-review is required for almost all documents. To facilitate this in between team members, an issue-tracking system from SourceCast, which is a software engineering tool suite, is used. When a team member produces a document, it is required that another member reviews the document and signs off on it before the document can be released to the public. In addition, a supporting team is assigned to each team. All documents produced by a team are reviewed the supporting team. At major milestones, such as at the end of the requirement phase or the end of the design phase, it is required that a formal review is provided by the supporting teams. Continuous feedback at any other time is encouraged. This is facilitated by the use of CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) document repository, through which the reviewer can always access the most up-to-date version of any documents in the repository.

Not all assignments have a minimum page requirement. But overall, each student will write more than twenty pages by the end of the course. To keep some documents concise and to-the-point, I even limit the number of pages they can use. For example, the tech review 1 and tech review 3 are limited to two pages.