MBA and M.S. in Software Engineering Dual Degree Master’s Program

Applied Analytics is a capstone course for the analytic-focused MBA program. It is intended to integrate all previously taken coursed in the program by presenting a set of increasingly complex business problems. These problems can be solved through analytic skill taught in this and previous courses. In particular, the course is intended to reinforce the understanding of analysis as way to build models that can focus attention on parts of the system that can be improved through intervention. The early part of the course uses synthetic data and empirical data readily available for analysis. The second part of the course encourages students to state and solve their own problem, gathering their own data as a part of the analytic process.

Project success depends, largely, on the human side. Success in motivating project workers, organizing and leading project teams, communication and sharing information, and conflict resolution, are just a few areas that are critical for project success. However, being primarily technical people, many project managers tend to neglect these "soft" issues, assuming they are less important or that they should be addressed by direct functional managers. The purpose of this course is to increase awareness of project managers to the critical issues of managing people and to present some of the theories and practices of leading project workers and teams.

Executives make decisions every day in the face of uncertainty. The objective of this course is to help students understand how decisions are made, why they are often less than optimal, and how decision-making can be improved. This course will contrast how managers do make decisions with how they should make decisions, by thinking about how “rational” decision makers should act, by conducting in-class exercises and examining empirical evidence of how individuals do act (often erroneously) in managerial situations. The course will include statistical tools for decision-making, as well as treatment of the psychological factors involved in making decisions.

The study of marketing principles from the conceptual, analytical, and managerial points of view. Topics include: strategic planning, market segmentation, product life-cycle, new product development, advertising and selling, pricing, distribution, governmental, and other environmental influences as these factors relate to markets and the business structure.

Covers the general area of management of operations, both manufacturing and non-manufacturing. The focus of the course is on productivity and total quality management. Topics include quality control and quality management, systems of inventory control, work and materials scheduling, and process management.

Project success depends, largely, on the human side. Success in motivating project workers, organizing and leading project teams, communication and sharing information, and conflict resolution, are just a few areas that are critical for project success. However, being primarily technical people, many project managers tend to neglect these "soft" issues, assuming they are less important or that they should be addressed by direct functional managers. The purpose of this course is to increase awareness of project managers to the critical issues of managing people and to present some of the theories and practices of leading project workers and teams.

An interdisciplinary course which examines the elements of, and the framework for, developing and implementing organizational strategy and policy in competitive environments. The course analyzes management problems both from a technical-economic perspective and from a behavioral perspective. Topics treated include: assessment of organizational strengths and weaknesses, threats, and opportunities; sources of competitive advantage; organizational structure and strategic planning; and leadership, organizational development, and total quality management. The case method of instruction is used extensively in this course.

This course introduces students to fundamental soft skills, work techniques, and technologies employed by management consultants. Topics covered in this course include project scoping, creating statements of work, meeting facilitation, project planning, design of presentations and written reports, management briefs, and delivery of status reports. The course will improve students’ ability to present analyses of issues and organizational problems in a concise, accurate, clear and interesting manner from the perspective of a consultant. This course is designed to be taken prior to the experiential graduate courses in the School of Business, including MGT 809: Industry Capstone Project.

In this course students work on an industry project with a team of their peers under the supervision of a faculty advisor and industry mentor. Students will work on project tasks and manage client expectations while applying their disciplinary and technical knowledge to the project. In addition to the project-specific deliverables, students will produce a statement of work, present weekly project updates, and a final presentation and project report to management. This one to two-credit course is tied to the Industry Capstone Program in the School of Business. Students must first apply for a project before registering for this course.

This course introduces the subject of software engineering, also known as software development process or software development best practice from a quantitative, i.e., analytic- and metrics-based point of view. Topics include introductions to: software life-cycle process models from the heaviest weight, used on very large projects, to the lightest weight, e.g., extreme programming; industry-standard software engineering tools; teamwork; project planning and management; object-oriented analysis and design. The course is case history and project oriented.

In software problem areas that require exploratory development efforts, those with complex requirements and high levels of change, agile software development practices are highly effective when deployed in a collaborative, people-centered organizational culture. This course examines agile methods, including Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Lean, Crystal, Dynamic Systems Development Method and Feature-Driven Development to understand how rapid realization of software occurs most effectively. The ability of agile development teams to rapidly develop high quality, customer-valued software is examined and contrasted with teams following more traditional methodologies that emphasize planning and documentation. Students will learn agile development principles and techniques covering the entire software development process from problem conception through development, testing and deployment, and will be able to effectively participate in and manage agile software developments as a result of their successfully completing this course. Case studies and software development projects are used throughout.

Requirements Acquisition is one of the least understood and hardest phases in the development of software products, especially because requirements are often unclear in the minds of many or most stakeholders. This course deals with the identification of stakeholders, the elicitation and verification, with their participation, of the requirements for a new or to-be-extended software product. It deals further with the analysis and modeling of requirements, the first steps in the direction of software design. Finally, it deals with the quality assurance aspects of the software requirements phase of the software development process. This course is case-history and project-oriented, and uses industry-standard software tools.

This course introduces students to the software design process and it’s models; representations of design/architecture; software architectures and design plans; design methods; design state assessment; design quality assurance; and design verification.

This course introduces students to systematic testing of software systems, software verification, symbolic execution, software debugging, quality assurance, measurement and prediction of software reliability, project management, software maintenance, software reuse and reverse engineering.

The course deals with the management of software projects using objective metrics that help developers and managers to understand the scope of the work to be accomplished, the risks that will occur, the tasks to be performed, the resources and effort to be expended, and the schedule to be observed. It provides the student with a thorough introduction to facility with, and understanding of such industry-standard software sizing metrics as Function, Feature, and Object Points and their relationship to the lines-of-code metric. It provides the student with a thorough introduction to and understanding of such industry-standard software estimation tools such as COCOMO II used in cost estimation.

Software Engineering Capstone Studio

PREREQUISITE: Need Permission - Graduate DEAN 698

This course introduces managers to the essence of business economics – the theories, concepts and ideas that form the economist’s tool kit encompassing both the microeconomic and macroeconomic environments. Microeconomic topics include demand and supply, elasticity, consumer choice, production, cost, profit maximization, market structure, and game theory while the Macroeconomic topics will be GDP, inflation, unemployment, aggregate demand, aggregate supply, fiscal and monetary policies. In addition the basic concepts in international trade and finance will be discussed.

This course will provide the student with the principles and techniques of financial and managerial accounting for technical organizations. The emphasis will be on the use of financial data for decision making. The basics of accounting will briefly be covered, with the major amount of time spent on ways to understand, analyze and use the data for decision making. Budgeting and analysis of performance, as well as, recognizing fixed and variable expenses are other key areas of financial management. Issues of valuation, time value of money, uncertainty and risk will be integrated in the material. The one-term course will make extensive use of the text by Weygandt et al (see below), supplemented by cases, exercises, homework and examinations. Emphasis will be on real-world, practical application of the tools of finance to management decision making.

Many managerial decisions - regardless of their functional orientation - are increasingly based on analysis using quantitative models from the discipline of management science. Management science tools, techniques and concepts (e.g., data, models, and software programs) have dramatically changed the way businesses operate in manufacturing, service operations, marketing, transportation, and finance. Business Analytics explores data-driven methods that are used to analyze and solve complex business problems. Students will acquire analytical skills in building, applying and evaluating various models with hands-on computer applications. Topics include descriptive statistics, time-series analysis, regression models, decision analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, and optimization models.