Abstract
Teaching software engineering (SWE) as a core computer science course (ACM, 2013) is a challenging task. The challenge lies in the emphasis on what a large-scale software means, implementing teamwork, and teaching abstraction in software design while simultaneously engaging students into reasonable coding tasks. The abstraction of the system design is perhaps the most critical and theoretical part of the course and requires early engagement of the students with the necessary topics followed by implementation of the abstract model consistently. Normally, students would take such courses in the undergraduate curriculum sequence after data structures and/or object-oriented design/programming. Therefore, they would be able to learn about systematic modeling of software as a system. In this work, we address how to facilitate the teaching of SWE by introducing abstract modeling. Furthermore, functional decomposition is reviewed as a critical component which in turn, requires understanding of how different tasks are accomplished by enterprise software. Combining such pieces with concepts of architecture and design patterns of software provides foundational knowledge for students to be able to navigate around enterprise software in the real world.
Highlights
The current state of software engineering (SWE) as a discipline has changed over the course of past 50 years due to many different reasons and it is still different from the traditional engineering disciplines which are built on solid theoretical foundations
The following section overviews the theory of abstraction in computer science followed by modeling and visual modeling as it relates to system level design and development
We overview the applicating of design patterns in different disciplines and discuss how modeling abstraction by design patterns can help with software engineering education from two perspectives, one from educational standpoint to address the teamwork and the second to teach SWE architectural concepts to smoothen the implementation process for the students
Summary
The current state of software engineering (SWE) as a discipline has changed over the course of past 50 years due to many different reasons and it is still different from the traditional engineering disciplines which are built on solid theoretical foundations. The following section overviews the theory of abstraction in computer science followed by modeling and visual modeling as it relates to system level design and development. Considering this discussion, we propose our visual representation of modeling as it relates to abstraction in SWE education. Design patterns as another abstraction tool for holistic system overview is presented in section 4 with a case study presenting a sample implementation based on the idea of this paper.
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