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Before class this week, to me, term Software Engineering meant the act of architect-ing an enormous system of features that fit together perfectly to create the ideal software solution for the need. After this week I have learned that the term means to the world the implication of utilizing an organized long term team dedicated to the project and its cohesion, complete with an update pattern, code reviews and an entire framework of practice in addition to whatever frameworks of software are being used.

Software Engineering takes into account risks and complexities of decisions that can affect the project and takes consideration of intent to bring the project through coherently into the future through long term software changes inside and outside the project.

Iterations of features are a focus which I naturally have used on my own because it makes sense to continually keep a reality check of a working feature set.

I've been programming for decades and when I was a kid I had fun constructing enormous projects that spiraled out of control, and although it was an adventure, I learned through doing that, that that is not the way to complete a project cohesively. My own current strategy and the strategy taught in this class which is called Agile is to keep the software working while adding realistic additions of features to continually build the system incrementally rather than from an entirely broken state to a finished one in one giant bungling step (which is nearly impossible anyway, so the principle of incremental building is based in practicality.)

This week we (re-)learned to install MySQL Workbench, PHPAdmin if it wasn't already there (I personally have a fast OS turnover, and it's never Windows, or Mac, even my mom uses Ubuntu now.) Spring Tools Framework, MySQL and a Java DB connection. I'm still working on the DB connection, maybe, actually I think it might work already, I just haven't finished checking. We're using PivotalTracker.com for the feature tracking system, GitHub for a repository I think, and we're making a 'school' app., software engineering style. This will include a MySQL database, Java server back end, React-built front end. We are using Eclipse with Spring Tools to build it and are responsible for all aspects of the system, it looks like even including feature requests, I'm not sure about that though, they might be assigned more specifically next week.