CS4530, Summer 2025: Fundamentals of Software Engineering

This repository contains the source for the website for Northeastern's CS4530, Summer 2025 class. If you are looking to browse the site, you should visit it directly, at https://neu-se.github.io/CS4530-Summer-2025/. If you are looking to edit the site, then you have come to the right place!

Websites for prior versions of this class:

• Spring 2025
• Fall 2024
• Spring 2024
• Fall 2023
• Spring 2023
• Fall 2022
• Spring 2022
• Fall 2021
• Spring 2021
• Fall 2020

License

All materials in this repository (the lectures, assignments, and also the site itself) are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Please feel free to reuse or remix these materials in your class. If you do, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

About this site

This website is built using Astro, a customizable framework for content-heavy static and dynamic sites (with an emphasis on static site generation). (As of 2025 when I'm creating this, Astro is a stable but currently-trendy toolset. If you're reading this in the future and Astro is an ancient and unmaintainable mess, I'm sorry, it was inevitable, but at least everything's mostly markdown under the hood. - Rob Simmons)

Local development environment

If you have Node LTS 22 or above, you should be able to go to:

npm install
npm run dev

and then go to the URL that pops up on the command line (probably http://localhost:4321/CS4530-Summer-2025).

🚀 Project Structure

Inside of the repository, you'll see the following folders and files:

/
├── .github/
├── pages/
│   ├── activities/
│   ├── calendar.md
│   ├── home.md
│   └── tutorials.md
├── public/
│   ├── code
│   │   └── week1-unit-testing
│   │       └── jest-tutorial-starter-code.zip
│   └── slides/
│       └── Lesson 1.1 Course Introduction.pptx
├── src/
│   ├── layouts/
│   └── content.config.js
├── .env
├── astro.config.mjs
└── package.json

Here are a couple of the relevant facts:

• Anything in the public/ directory is placed, unprocessed, on the website. So that zip fill will be at $PROJECT_ROOT/code/week1-unit-testing/jest-tutorial-starter-code.zip.
• The src/ directory, along with the astro.config.mjs file, contain all the Astro configuration for the project. In most cases it should not be necessary to touch this configuration unless you're changing the site.
• Each page in the pages/ directory corresponds to a page on the site (with the same path, minus the .md extension). Astro is, in general, big on file-based routing.
• The .env file contains site-wide configuration. If you're updating the website for a new semester, or adapting the repository for a new course, you'll need to update the values in this file.
• The src/ contains all the code for building the site, but hopefully shouldn't need to be messed with too much once it's set up.

Modules

The website tries to adhere to file-based routing off the pages/ directory. The big exception are modules. The information architecture of the course looks like this:

• Lessons are the atomic units of content. Slides and learning goals are associated with lessons.
• Lectures are the way that lessons are presented temporally. In a multi-section course, different sections can share the same lectures, or use different lectures; each lecture covers some number of lessons.
• Modules are the "chapters" of a course: thematic collections of lectures with a larger overarching goal. Just like with a textbook, lectures don't have to work through modules in any particular order.

Modules, and the lessons in them, can be either:

• Inferred: the presence of a file public/slides/Whatever 3.2 Name of Lesson.pptx will tell the system that there is a module 3 with a lesson 2 titled "Name of Lesson."
• Defined: the presence of a file modules/03.mdx will define a sequence of lessons in this module. Lesson titles in this file will override inferred lesson titles.

Page types

All files in the pages/ directory have a title, an optional nav_order number, and an optional nav_exclude boolean. The last two control the appearance of the navigation menu.

• Top-level pages (pages/*.mdx) are part of primary navigation and default to nav_exclude: false.
• Second-level pages (pages/*/*.mdx) are part of secondary navigation and default to nav_exclude: false.
• Third-or-more level pages are part of secondary navigation but default to nav_exclude: true.

There are several page types aside from type: basic.

• There has to be exactly one page with type: home somewhere in pages/
• type: directory must be a top-level page, and repeats the list of child pages that appear in navigation
• type: assignment comes with a deadline, which appears on the calendar
• type: lecture comes with an optional list of lessons, <module>.<lesson> numbers that are included in the page
• type: calendar describes a course calendar

Links

The website uses <base> element, which means that all relative links on the site are relative to the root of the project, https://neu-se.github.io/CS4530-Summer-2025/ or whatever. In general, you should use fully relative links: if you're trying to link to the page specified as pages/tutorials.md from anywhere on the site, it should look like [this](tutorials), and if you're trying to link to the public/code/week1-unit-testing/jest-tutorial-starter-code.zip file from anywhere on the site, it should look like [this](code/week1-unit-testing/jest-tutorial-starter-code.zip).