Archinotes: A tool for assisting software architecture courses

Abstract

During the last years, software architecture has become an increasingly necessary subject in IT education. At Universidad de los Andes, a software architecture course is taught midway through the Systems and Computer Engineering degree and aims to create skills within the student to identify quality requirements as well as designing software architectures for middle-sized systems. However, based on statistics over the last 8 years of our Software Architecture course, we've noticed that correctly identifying quality requirements seems to be a recurring issue among students. One of the course's objectives comprehends the construction of an architecture document during the semester, which must be done in groups who tend to find it difficult to get together and work as a team. This paper present Archinotes, a collaboration tool to support the teaching of software architectures by facilitating collaboration workload and providing useful information on the difficulties and progress of the students to the course's teacher. The conclusions of the paper prove Archinotes effective in helping students learn critical concepts and artifacts during the software architecture course.