Course description

Course Contents

The course has two main subjects. The first one is software engineering: we elaborate on various topics that were touched upon in module Software Engineering Theory (Bachelor Medical Informatics), including: RUP, Agile methods and testing. The second main subject is software architecture. During the Bachelor programme the student has written various small computer applications. Large software systems have different, more complex architectures. Such architectures will be discussed in this course. Topics are: dynamic languages (including scripting languages and components); parallel-ism (super computers, grid computing), inter-operability (Service-Orientated Architectures, web services, multi-agent systems). The lectures are the basis of the course. Moreover students choose a subject for which they write a literature survey and fulfill a practical assignment. Feedback will be provided after two weeks. In the last week, on Monday, the students present their results. On Friday there will be a written exam that covers the lectures and the study material.

 

Course lay-out

Lectures and work groups.

 

Educational goals

Many software systems that are used in healthcare are large-scale systems with strong interdependencies, such as Hospital Information Systems. To understand how such systems work and how they can be designed knowledge is required of their basic architectures and of methodologies that facilitate their development. Upon successfully completing this course the student has:

• Knowledge of and some experience with the application of selected system development methodologies.
• Knowledge of various architectures for complex software systems.

 

Involved departments

• Clinical Informatics

 

Evaluation

Evaluation of the course and assignments

In a group of four students we had to create an application. We have created an application with uses the XSLT, XSL-FO and XPath. We had downloaded all the MeSH-terms from the PubMed database and we created a search application, users could enter a search term and our application will search the XML-based MeSH-term files for any hits. The hits were displayed and could be stored as a PDF-file; the PDF was created with help of the XSLT and XSL-FO methodology, the user could also access the MeSH-term information page and could also download this information in PDF. It was very interesting to acquire experience and knowledge with a different methodology; I realized that this is a very powerful technique and documents could be created when the user requested it (you do not have to store every document on your server) and store it on their local hard disk. I had to read a lot about the methodology, because I had never heard of it. At first it was very difficult and I spent hours to find out how everything works. However it was very interesting and I am proud on the result of the project we have done. I understand the reason why an exam was scheduled. However when you are spending so much time on the project; you do not have much time to learn everything for the exam. Furthermore the presentation skills of the coordinator are below acceptable levels and he should improve it skills; otherwise it would be very difficult to stay awake.