The Software Development course teaches about
software development for problem solving software,
specifically optimization problem solving software.
While this includes an important chunk of
software we depend on, it does not include 
operating systems or compilers or networking software
or GUIs, accounting software.

How do the techniques learned from SCG(X) generalize to other domains?

The students learn about:

The importance of testing: 
Frequent competitions (= systems tests) force the students
to submit programs whose components have been carefully unit tested.

Decomposing problems and incremental software development:
Breaking down big tasks into manageable tasks. We show them
how to break down Baseball into TBall, Slow Pitch Softball,
and Fast Pitch Softball.
At each level, the agent is broken down into
propose, oppose (strengthen, challenge), provide, and solve
subcomponents.

Security:
The integrity of the scientific game hinges on the administrator.
If it contains vulnerabilities there are other ways of
winning than programming the best domain knowledge into the agent.

Importance of shy programming
Software evolves and has to adapt to new requirements frequently.
Avoid scattering of information in the program.
Localize to one point of control, if possible.

Feature interaction
When a new feature is added, one has to study the interactions 
with exisiting features.

Requirements and requirements analysis
Software developers need to help users to formulate their requirements.
Software developers need to stand up to their users if what the users
propose does not make sense.
The requirements are simple: win!!! But implementing the requirements
requires careful requirements analysis.

The importance of tools to simplify software development
We use DemeterF to generate parsers and classes.
Students develop tools to analyze the competition histories
to improve their agent for the next competition.

Importance of software development process 
Each team reflects on their process. The entire class
works on one project using the SCG software development process.
Although one agent wins, all the other agents are important
facilitators by trying to show the best agent that
it contains bugs (and vice versa).

This list can be made much longer.