Schedule¶
August 24 to December 9, 2026. Monday and Wednesday are lecture, demonstrated on Project Pulse. Friday is studio, where your team applies the week's move to your own client project.
This calendar represents current plans. Changes will be announced in class and pushed to this page.
No class on these days¶
| Labor Day | Monday, September 7 |
| Fall break | Thursday, October 8 and Friday, October 9. Classes recess Wed Oct 7 at 10:00 PM, resume Mon Oct 12 at 8:00 AM. |
| Thanksgiving break | Monday, November 23 through Friday, November 27. Classes recess Fri Nov 20 at 10:00 PM, resume Mon Nov 30 at 8:00 AM. |
Dates from the TCU Registrar's Fall 2026 academic dates. The term runs fifteen instructional weeks.
The arc¶
- Weeks 1-2, setup. Why software engineering, what AI changes, and standing up the team, GitHub, and Project Pulse. You use AI from day one.
- Weeks 3-13, run the method. Author the specification and a breadth-complete architecture, prove it with one vertical slice, then fan out one use case at a time.
- Weeks 10-15, production readiness. Gate, automate, observe, maintain, reflect. Overlaps the end of the fan-out.
Week by week¶
| Wk | Dates | Mon + Wed lecture | Fri studio | Project milestone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aug 24, 26, 28 | A real failure story; what software engineering is, and what AI changed about the job; the delegation boundary, the Napkin frame, and how an agent session goes wrong Story Slides Reading |
No studio. Three lecture days. Setup and the first AI-assisted task are assignment 1. | Interest and skills survey, due Fri Aug 28 |
| 2 | Aug 31, Sep 2, 4 | The AI-augmented team and GitHub as single source of truth; professionalism, team contract, conflict protocol Mon slides Mon reading Wed slides Wed reading |
Your team's first hour together: fix your meeting slot, sign the contract, stand up repo, board, and Slack. Checkpoint 0 is verified in the room as you work. Studio |
Teams, clients, and project briefs released Wed Sep 2; contract signed, board and Slack up, first client meeting requested |
| 3 | ~~Sep 7~~, 9, 11 | Labor Day, no class Monday. Requirements as the contract (1 of 2): eliciting from a real client, the glossary, vision and scope Slides Reading Requirement types |
Napkin round 0 on your own project, then draft your glossary and vision and scope Studio |
First client meetings; requirements elicitation begins |
| 4 | Sep 14, ~~16~~, 18 | No class Wednesday. Requirements as the contract (2 of 2): use cases Monday; business rules, quality attributes, constraints, and the specification Friday Slides Reading Use case style guide |
No studio. Write your use cases and business rules and draft the SRS in your team's own meeting slot; your TA checks it at the start of week 5's studio | Draft specification underway |
| 5 | Sep 21, 23, 25 | Context engineering: the specification is the context, and when is it enough. Napkin round 1 opens Wednesday Slides Reading |
Week 4's team work checked by your TA, then finish the specification for Checkpoint 1; your TA reviews your riskiest use case with you Studio |
Draft specification ready for review |
| 6 | Sep 28, 30, Oct 2 | Software architecture, just enough: breadth-complete and depth-shallow, architecturally significant requirements, security as a quality attribute Slides Reading |
Checkpoint 1: your TA reviews your specification in the room while your team drafts its architecture-of-record, merged by 11:59 pm and checked over the weekend. Assignment 2 is due the same morning, before class. Studio |
Specification reviewed; architecture-of-record drafted |
| 7 | Oct 5, 7, ~~9~~ | Design-of-record and design decisions; the design gate; proving the architecture with one vertical slice Slides Reading Template |
Fall break, no studio. Design your proving slice's use case area out of class: merged by pull request, approved by a teammate, by Wed Oct 14, 11:59 pm | Proving slice designed |
| 8 | Oct 12, ~~14~~, 16 | No class Wednesday. Monday: estimating a use case in human hours, what the agent may read and run, then building with the agent. Friday is a lecture this week, not a studio: code review, reviewing what the agent built against the use case and its test list Mon: Slides Reading Fri: Code review slides Code review reading |
No studio. In your team meeting, by Sun Oct 18: turn your riskiest use cases into agent build-contexts, in pairs, and run the questions test on them before the agent builds Studio |
Fan-out begins |
| 9 | Oct 19, 21, 23 | Mon Oct 19: midterm exam (study guide). Wednesday: the traceability anchor, forward and backward, drift, and the release plan. Friday is a lecture this week, not a studio: impact analysis, what a change touches before you make it Traceability slides Traceability reading |
No studio. Three lecture days. | More use cases built and traced |
| 10 | Oct 26, 28, 30 | Monday only: testing, the pyramid and AI-generated tests Slides Reading |
Wednesday and Friday are both studio. Install /design and /implement, merge your proving slice's design, then build, review, and merge the sliceStudio |
Proving slice built and merged |
| 11 | Nov 2, 4, 6 | Monday: static analysis, linters, SpotBugs, ESLint, shift left Slides Reading Wednesday: CI/CD, automating the gates, linters and tests in a pipeline Slides Reading |
Build a pipeline with quality gates on your repo | Checkpoint 2 to your TA, in a slot you book outside class by Fri Nov 6: architecture and proving slice demo |
| 12 | Nov 9, 11, 13 | Monday: observability and debugging: logs, metrics, traces, and what each number misses Slides Reading Wednesday: live lab on Project Pulse: Actuator, a Grafana dashboard with alerts, production's Live Metrics, a stopped mail server, the 500 found from its log line Reliability is reading this week Slides Reading |
Fan-out work time on your own project, with your TA in the room | More use cases built and traced |
| 13 | Nov 16, 18, 20 | Maintainability, readability, developer tooling; software metrics and technical debt as a lens | Checkpoint 3 to your TA. The traceability honesty check and the refactor with the agent move to your team's own meeting time | Fan-out plus production readiness |
| Nov 23-27 | Thanksgiving break, no class | |||
| 14 | Nov 30, Dec 2, 4 | Ethics capstone and the graduate-profile reflection | MVP demos, teams 1-4 | Demo dry-runs |
| 15 | Dec 7, 9 | MVP demos, teams 5-8 (Mon) and teams 9-12 (Wed); team retrospective | No studio, last day of class is Wed Dec 9 | MVP delivered to client |
Final exam: Monday, December 14, 8:00 - 10:30 AM.
Each week's materials are linked at the end of its lecture cell. Slides is that week's deck, Story is a narrated set piece where there is one, and Reading is the full written module behind the lecture, for when you want more than the deck. Reading is optional unless a row says otherwise. Links appear as material is written, so weeks further out are still bare.
Checkpoints¶
Four times in the term, your team presents a checkpoint to its TA. Three of them take the Friday studio hour, and that week's own-project objective moves to out-of-class team time. Checkpoint 0 is not a presentation: your TA verifies it in the room while your team works. Checkpoint 2 is not on a Friday: your team books a slot with its TA outside class during week 11.
Fri Sep 4 (kickoff gate) · Fri Oct 2 · week 11, by Fri Nov 6 · Fri Nov 20. They are marked in the grid above.
What each checkpoint requires is on the Senior Design Project page, which is the page to read before you prepare one. After Checkpoint 3 the next thing your client sees is the MVP demo, so the weeks after it are hardening on your own schedule.
Threaded through every week¶
Some topics get no row of their own because they are practiced continuously rather than taught once.
- Code review. Every studio reviews AI output. This is the highest-leverage human skill in the course.
- Traceability. Practiced weekly after the week 8 anchor, on your growing codebase.
- Risk. Every topic carries the classic failure and the one AI introduces or amplifies.
- The delegation boundary. Revisited at each new topic: what do we hand the agent here, and what stays human?
- Security. Enters in week 6 as an architecturally significant requirement, then threads through implementation, static analysis, and CI/CD.
- Ethics. Surfaces as real cases arise, and is capstoned in week 14.
Self-study this term¶
Open source: dependencies and supply chain, contributing to code you do not own, reading an unfamiliar codebase with an agent. Fifteen weeks do not hold every topic worth knowing, and this is the one taught as reading rather than in class. The written module stands on its own and is worth your time before you start interviewing; it is not examined.
The Napkin drill¶
The Napkin drill is paused for the rest of the term after round 1. The six-prompt frame from week 1 is still yours to use before any agent session (the module), and your team's sealed docs/napkin-round-0.md stays in your repository.