Teaching Software Architecture Research Articles

Training software architects suiting software industry needs: A literature review

The ability to define, evaluate, and implement software architectures is a fundamental skill for software engineers. However, teaching software architecture can be challenging as it requires students to be involved in real-context projects with high degrees of complexity. This involves making trade-off decisions among several quality attributes. Furthermore, the academic perception of software architecture differs from the industrial viewpoint. To address this issue, a study was conducted to identify and analyze the strategies, challenges, and course experiences used for teaching software architectures. The study analyzed 56 articles reporting on teaching experiences focused specifically on software architectures or focused on software engineering in general but discussing software architecture. The main contributions of this work include identifying strategies used in educating software architecture students aligned with the needs of the software industry. These strategies include short design projects, large development projects, and projects with actual clients. Additionally, the study compared curriculum contents in software development and architecture courses and identified recurring topics such as architecture patterns, quality attributes, and architectural views. This study also recognizes the set of skills that students of software architecture should develop during training, such as leadership and negotiation. The challenges in software architecture training were discussed, such as instructors’ lack of experience in actual projects, the abstract and fuzzy nature of software architectures, and the difficulty of involving clients and industry experts. Evaluation methods commonly used in training software architects, such as surveys, pre-test/post-test, and quality metrics on architectural artifacts, were identified and described. Overall, this study guides researchers and educators in improving their software architecture courses by incorporating strategies reported by the literature review. These strategies can bring architecture courses closer to the needs and conditions of the software industry.

Architecture Description Language – Systematic Literature Review

increase numbers and complexity of software development requires that learners of software engineering and software architecture or software architects who do not have sufficient practical experience must have the skills and abilities to perform their jobs. But there is a gap between academia and practical so the question why does not use one of the architecture description languages in teaching and learn software engineering and software architecture to fill this gap? The objective of this study to classification ADLs according to their domain, domain specific or general purpose languages, doing these systematic literature review flowing the steps from Ketchenham. As the result we find that most ADLs are Domain Specific ADLs (Aviation Systems, Distribution Systems, Mobile Systems, Product Lines …etc. ) none of these ADLs is used in the field of software architecture education, but most intended to deal with experts in the field, except general purpose ADLs, like ACME, which we make as start point to design Arabic ADL, so as to enrich Arabic content, also to be as helping language in teaching Software Architecture course, because most of ADLs need experience and high level of understanding to use, moreover, when student think and design with same language subject more understandable. So using software architecture description languages in educating purpose, help on understanding high level of abstraction of software architecture and software engineering courses, there are some studies that aimed to reduce the complexity of these courses using different methodologies and approaches, but none of them using architecture description languages as helping tool. So the use of architecture description languages is helpful in teaching software architecture and software engineering courses.

Teaching Software Architecture in LATAM Universities through a Distributed CSCL Activity

Teaching Software Architecture in LATAM Universities through a Distributed CSCL Activity

Extensive Evaluation of Using a Game Project in a Software Architecture Course

This article describes an extensive evaluation of introducing a game project to a software architecture course. In this project, university students have to construct and design a type of software architecture, evaluate the architecture, implement an application based on the architecture, and test this implementation. In previous years, the domain of the software architecture project has been a robot controller for navigating a maze. In 2008, the students on the software architecture course chose between the two domains: Khepera robot simulation in Java and XNA game development in C#. Independent of the domain chosen, the students had to go through the same phases, produce the same documents based on the same templates, and follow exactly the same process. This article describes an evaluation where we wanted to investigate if a game development project could successfully be used to teach software architecture. Specifically in the evaluation, the effect of the choice of COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) and domain is compared in relation to popularity of the project type, how the students perceive the project, the complexity of the software architectures produced, the effort put into the project, and the grades achieved for the project and the written examination. The main conclusion is that game development projects can successfully be used to teach software architecture. Further, the results of the evaluation show among other things that students who chose the Game project produced software architecture with higher complexity, and put more effort into the project than the Robot project students. No significant statistical differences were found in final grades awarded to the Game project students vs. Robot project students. However, the Game project students obtained a higher grade in their project than in the written examination, whereas the Robot project students scored higher in the written examination than in their project. Finally compared to the Robot project students, those that chose the Game project had fewer problems with COTS hindering the architecture design and introducing technical challenges.

Using Game Development to Teach Software Architecture

This paper describes a case study of how a game project using the XNA Game Studio from Microsoft was implemented in a software architecture course. In this project, university students have to construct and design a type of software architecture, evaluate the architecture, implement an application based on the architecture, and test this implementation. In previous years, the domain of the software architecture project has been a robot controller for navigating a maze.Robot controllerwas chosen as the domain for the project, as there exist several papers and descriptions on reference architectures for managing mobile robots. This paper describes the changes we had to make to introduce an XNA game development project to the software architecture course, and our experiences from running a software architecture project focusing on game development and XNA. The experiences described in this paper are based on feedback from the course staff, the project reports of the students, and a mandatory course evaluation. The evaluation shows among other things that the majority of the students preferred the game project to the robot project, that XNA was considered to be suitable platform for a software architecture project, that the students found it useful to learn XNA and C#, and that some students were carried away when developing the game in the software architecture project.

Game Technology for Training and Education

Serious games are being more and more deployed in such diverse areas as public awareness, military training, and higher education. One of the driving forces behind this stems from the rapidly growing availability of game technologies, providing not only better, faster, and more realistic graphics, physics, and animations, but above all making “the language” of game development accessible to increasingly more people. The articles in this special issue are a rich sampling of how game technology can be creatively put to service within games for training and education purposes. The first two articles are focused on simulation applications. In “SIDH—a game-based architecture for a training simulator,” Backlund et al. extend the notion of gamebased simulation proposing an architecture for a professional firefighter training simulator that incorporates novel visualization and interaction modes. The serious game, developed in cooperation with the government agency responsible for the training of fire and rescue personnel, is a good example of how game technology helps making the delicate combination of engaging level design and carefully tuned learning objectives. In “Experiential learning in vehicle dynamics education via motion simulation and interactive gaming,” Hulme et al. present an original methodology developed within their vehicle dynamics curriculum, incorporating a combination of driving simulation, motion simulation, and educational practices into a game-based simulation framework. The paper also includes a comprehensive evaluation of their approach in two practical, educational scenarios. The next two articles describe specific applications of game technology to serious games aimed at computer science education. In “An application of game development framework in higher education,” Wang et al. present their experiences with an XNA-based game project for teaching software architecture. The paper also includes a brief survey and evaluation of game frameworks currently available for these purposes. On the other hand, in “Towards a serious game to help students learn computer programming,” Muratet et al. describe the design and development of a strategy game aimed at strengthening novice programming skills, including an interesting discussion on the mapping of learning objectives into the game play. Finally, in “Venation skeleton-based modeling plant leaf wilting,” Lu et al. present an original method for simulating and visualizing leaf wilting, useful in the domain of biology. Interestingly, their technique can be applied both in a didactic setting andwithin any graphics framework requiring realistic visualization of natural phenomena. We believe that serious games will continue to foster the development of new game technologies, and, conversely, combining and deploying existing game technology in novel ways will likely extend and amplify the impact and innovation achieved by these games in our society.

A project approach for teaching software architecture and web services in a software engineering course

Software architecture focuses on the structure of a software system, how such structure is organized into components, how components are related to each other, and what are the external visible pro...