Software engineering: turning theory into practice

The term 'Software Engineering' was coined in the mid 1960s, it is said, as a challenge to the software community to start rationalising the software production process. Software engineering is a very young discipline and this challenge still eludes LHC demands software production on a scale far beyond that previously addressed in HEP and we are relying on software engineering to allow a significant number of people address this problem collectively. This series of lectures presents the basics of software engineering from the developer's point of view. The aim is to show how individual developers can improve the quality of the software they produce while avoiding the conflict between the creative process of designing software and the organisational needs of large projects.The Laser Interferometer Gravitanional Wave Observatory (LIGO) is being constructed with a goal to detect these waves and then to use them as a new tool to explore and study The sources of gravitanional waves and techniques for detection will be presented, as well as the status and prospects for the LIGO project.