As you can see from the title, I ask this question to myself when I started taking Introduction to Software Engineering. Although I have the experience of writing code and making simple programs that do a designated task, I do not have the same skills when it comes to making full blown applications and software that provide a variety of uses that isn’t just sorting an array. Sure, I may have dabbled in more complicated areas such as modding or using graphics APIs. But it’s not to an extent where I have created something useful outside of just learning them. So I don’t really have clear goals and a grasp on what I will be learning for this class.
Though I am approaching this class without a strong understanding of software engineering, I can still hold expectations about what I will learn throughout this course. I hope to learn the proper pipeline in the development of software and applications. This would help me understand what I am expected to do in software development positions. Not only that, I hope to come to learn the tools that makes applications accessible for public hands. This includes things like learning how to create user interfaces. It would really help flesh out my future projects and make them more accessible. Other miscellaneous things I would enjoy learning would be using other IDEs, other languages, and any other tool that would help expand my ability to create software.
In the future, I wish to able to apply learned software engineering skills to development of software related to computer graphics. Right now, the programs I can create is limited in functionality and user interaction. I can have vertices and shapes appear in a 3D space. However doing things like perhaps transforming these vertices can only be done by directly changing the code. By learning more about user interfaces, I can circumvent this problem. Just learning software engineering techniques may help speed up the time I write and debug software through more exposure and practice with programming.