Data scientists work in teams and it's important for each team member to understand software engineering processes and practices. From requirements gathering to agile development to testing and deployment, the ability to go beyond writing macros and simple scripts is key to both more sophisticated analyses and building reproducible and scalable data investigations and data products. This course, based in Python, will cover fundamental aspects of computer science, good practices in software engineering, and practical aspects of deploying code in production environments. To do this, we will use the Python language, a simple yet elegant general purpose programming language that is well-suited for data analysis and visualization.
Upon successful completion of the course, students will:
- Understand software architecture and design
- Examine agile and hypothesis-driven software development processes
- Identify team roles and workflows in software engineering
- Conduct requirements gathering
- Use Git and Github for version control and collaboration
- Recognize the importance of testing and building test suites
- Understand the legal aspects of software development
- Apply software engineering practices to your data science project
Enrollment in this course is restricted. Students must submit an application and be accepted into the Certificate in Data Science in order to register for this course.
Current Georgetown students must create an application using their Georgetown NetID and password. New students will be prompted to create an account.
Course prerequisites include:
- A bachelor's degree or equivalent
- Completion of at least two college-level math courses (e.g. statistics, calculus, etc.)
- Successful completion of Foundations of Data Analytics and Data Science (XBUS-500)
- Basic familiarity with programming or a programming language
- A laptop for class meetings and coursework
Students with little or no programming experience are strongly encouraged to complete Python Basics for Data Analysis before enrolling in this course.