Principles and practices forming the foundation for developing secure software systems. Coverage ranges across the entire development lifecycle: requirements, design, implementation and testing. Emphasis is on practices and patterns that reduce or eliminate security breaches in software intensive systems, and on testing systems to expose security weaknesses.

This course explores the concepts of process and product quality assurance and introduces approaches and support tools used to extract the information needed to assess and evaluate the quality of existing software systems. Major maintenance activities are detailed including unit and regression testing, test case generation, software refactoring, API migrations, bug localization and triage, and predicting technical debt. Students will participate in an active learning approach by exercising and practicing code reviews, software testing tools, and quality frameworks.

This course provides the student with an opportunity to explore a project-based research experience that advances knowledge in that area. The student selects a research problem, conducts background research, develops the system, analyses the results, and builds a professional document and presentation that disseminates the project. The report must include an in-depth research report on a topic selected by the student and in agreement with the student's adviser. The report must be structured as a conference paper, and must be submitted to a conference selected by the student and his/her adviser.

This course provides the student with an opportunity to complete their capstone project, if extra time if needed after enrollment in SWEN-790. The student continues to work closely with his/her adviser.