Students in COS 340 (Software Engineering) last fall wrote an interactive “Hyper Concordance” for the Bible. The students were divided into teams of three or four, and each team wrote their own back-end code as well as their own user interfaces for the programs.
Software Engineering is a class devoted to studying the concepts, procedures, and tools of large system software project development, including project estimation and management, software technical metrics, configuration management, and software testing.
Part of the project was done using the traditional waterfall development methodology, and then part-way through the project, Dr. Nurkkala had them switch to a more modern, agile methodology, extreme programming.
What the program does is to compare each verse in the Bible with every other verse and compiles a large list of how many words in those verses match. It uses those lists to suggest to users which verses are likely to be most similar to the ones that they are currently looking at.
For some students, this was their first real-world applicable programming experience. One sophomore commented, “I learned a great deal about the software engineering process through working on this concordance tool, especially about working in a team. . . . I am grateful for the opportunity to grow as a programmer and team participant.”
Dr. Nurkkala wrote to Crossway (the company that holds the copyright to the English Standard Version of the Bible) about the project, and they are interested in hosting a copy of the final program on their system. Senior David Kaspar volunteered to polish up his team’s program for use on the Crossway Web site using the ESV.