Software Engineering Foundations Training

Duration: 8 hours

Alpinum’s Software Engineering Foundations Training gives engineers a practical grounding in the core workflows used in modern software development. The course is designed for graduate engineers, early-career developers, systems engineers and technical teams who need a structured introduction to professional software engineering practices.

This training covers the software development lifecycle, Git and GitHub workflows, Linux fundamentals, command line usage, build systems, debugging, testing fundamentals, design patterns and Agile development. It is suitable as a standalone course or as the first module in a wider software development programme.

Who Should Attend?

This course is suitable for:

• • Graduate engineers starting software development roles

• • Engineers moving into software, systems or embedded development

• • Technical teams needing a common foundation in modern software workflows

• • Managers building structured onboarding for junior engineers

What the Course Covers

Participants learn how professional software projects are structured, developed, tested and maintained. The course introduces practical engineering habits that support collaboration, code quality and maintainability.

Key topics include:

• • Software development lifecycle

• • Git and GitHub workflows

• • Linux and command line fundamentals

• • Build systems

• • Debugging techniques

• • Unit testing and test-driven development

• • Design patterns

• • Agile development practices

Practical Labs

The course includes hands-on labs covering Git workflows, Linux shell exercises and unit testing. Participants work through practical tasks such as creating feature branches, resolving merge conflicts, navigating the Linux file system, processing logs, writing scripts and building test suites.

Git workflows:

Learning Objectives: Git fundamentals, Branching strategies, Conflict resolution, Collaborative workflows.

Description: Set up a local repository, create feature branches, simulate an enterprise merge conflict, resolve it, and implement a standard GitHub Pull Request workflow.

Tasks: Initialize a local repository, create isolated feature branches (e.g., feature/login, feature/logout), introduce conflicting lines of code, resolve the merge conflict, and push to a remote GitHub repository to simulate a Pull Request review cycle.

Extension Tasks: Analyze differences between git rebase and git merge, and configure a robust .gitignore file.

Linux shell exercises:

Learning Objectives: CLI navigation, File system management, Text processing pipelines, and automation scripting.

Description: Navigate the Linux file system using terminal utilities, execute automated text parsing on server logs, and compose an industrial automation shell script.

Tasks: Perform directory traversal (cd, ls, pwd, mkdir, cp, mv, rm), use stream filters (grep, awk, sed) to extract information from logs, implement bash pipelines (|) and redirection (>, >>) for reports, and write a bash script to inspect directories and compress backup files.

Extension Tasks: Configure system access controls (chmod, chown) and schedule background maintenance using cron jobs.

Unit testing:
Learning Objectives: Test design patterns, Test-Driven Development (TDD) cycle, Robust validation assertions, Edge case evaluation.

Description: Develop an operational software utility and construct an exhaustive automated test script to validate processing accuracy and boundary fault safety.

Tasks: Write algorithms incorporating active runtime validation (e.g., division by zero checks), construct an independent test file using a standard runner framework, design a suite with positive checks and extreme input boundaries, and execute the framework to track results.

Extension Tasks: Adopt a strict TDD workflow by constructing failing assertions first, and integrate programmatic mock components to mimic unresponsive peripheral services.

Assessment

• •  Hands-on Exercises: Directed development blocks focused on track-specific implementation challenges.

• • Quizzes: Milestone-based knowledge checks to ensure students remain aligned with architectural best practices throughout the project lifecycle.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, participants will be able to work confidently with Git, use Linux command line tools, understand software project structure, apply debugging and testing practices, and contribute more effectively to engineering teams.

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