Teaching Software Architecture to Undergraduate Students: An Experience Report

Rupakheti, Chandan R.; Chenoweth, Stephen F.

doi:10.1109/icse.2015.177

Cited by 20 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…", "Is there a golden or standard solution for the choice of architecture?" [11]. As such, it may not be sufficient to simply present a case study, but to deeply engage students in generating, comparing, and evaluating design alternatives and systematically arriving at a solution in consideration of the given requirements.…”

Section: A Challenges In Teaching Software Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open Design Case Study -- A Crowdsourcing Effort to Curate Software Design Case Studies

Chong¹,

Kang²,

Shaw³

2023

Preprint

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Case study-based learning has been successfully integrated into various courses, including software engineering education. In the context of software design courses, the use of case studies often entails sharing of real successful or failed software development. Using examples of real-world case studies allows educators to reinforce the applicability and usefulness of fundamental design concepts, relate the importance of evaluating design trade-offs with respect to stakeholders' requirements, and highlight the importance of upfront design where students that lack industrial experience tend to overlook. However, the use of real-world case studies is not straightforward because 1.) there is a lack of open source repositories for real software design case studies and 2.) even if case studies are available, they are often reported without a standardized format, which may hinder the alignment between the case and the desired learning outcomes. To address the lack of software design case studies for educational purposes, we propose the idea of Open Design Case Study, a repository to crowdsource, curate, and recruit other educators to contribute case studies for teaching software design courses. The platform will also allow educators and students to share, brainstorm, and discuss design solutions based on case studies shared publicly on the repository.

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Section: A Challenges In Teaching Software Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open Design Case Study -- A Crowdsourcing Effort to Curate Software Design Case Studies

Chong¹,

Kang²,

Shaw³

2023

Preprint

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“…The course has been proposed with the mission to fill these gaps, or at least to try doing it, giving students additional tools allowing them to deal with job interviews. Soft ware archi tecture is a complex topic to teach because of the "fuzziness" of the concept it self (Galster and Angelov, 2016), and often most of architectural decisions are just opin ions -there are no clear solutions, either good or bad (Rupakheti and Chenoweth, 2015). Further more, quoting Galster and Angelov (2016), "the nature of software architecture is practical rather than theoretical (like fundamental mathematics).…”

Section: Course Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Designing a Master Course on Architectures for Big Data: A Collaboration between University and Industry

Condorelli¹,

Malchiodi²

2022

Informatics in Education

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We describe a collaboration between Marelli and Università degli Studi di Milano that allowed the latter to add a course on «Architectures for Big Data» in its Master programme of Computer Science, with the aim of providing a teaching approach characterized by an intertwined exposition of discipline, methodology and practical tools. We were motivated by the need of filling, at least in part, the gap between the expectation of employers and the competences acquired by students. Indeed, several big-data-related tools and patterns of widespread use in working environments are seldom taught in the academic context. The course also allowed to expose students to company-related processes and topics. So far, the course has been taught for two editions, and a third one is currently ongoing. Using both a quantitative and a qualitative approach, we show that students appreciated this new form of learning activities, in terms of enrollments, exam marks, and activated external theses. We also exploited the received feedback in order to slightly modify the content and the structure of the course.

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“…Rupakheti and Chenoweth experimented with teaching undergraduate students software architecture for a decade [12]. They found that teaching the topic is challenging because it contrasts the students' habits in the other computer science courses.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, some of our students expressed, in Spring 2017, that they are not able to use their knowledge to design software architectures. The problem of self-confidence of software architecture students has been addressed, in our opinion, by focusing on practicing with design patterns [12] or adopting the clinical mode [13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Confidence of Undergraduate Students in Designing Software Architecture

Othmane¹,

Jamil²

2021

Preprint

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This paper investigates the relations between undergraduate software architecture students' self-confidence and their course expectations, cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and critical thinking. Background: these students, often, lack self-confidence in their ability to use their knowledge to design software architectures. Intended Outcomes: Self-confidence is expected to be related to the students' course expectations, cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and critical thinking. Application Design: We developed a questionnaire with open-ended questions to assess the self-confidence levels and related factors, which was taken by one-hundred ten students in two semesters. The students answers were coded and analyzed afterward. Findings: We found that self-confidence is weakly associated with the students' course expectations and critical thinking and independent from their cognitive levels and preferred learning methods. The results suggest that to improve the self-confidence of the students, the instructors should ensure that the students' have "correct" course expectations and work on improving the students' critical thinking capabilities.

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Teaching Software Architecture to Undergraduate Students: An Experience Report

Cited by 20 publications

References 9 publications

Open Design Case Study -- A Crowdsourcing Effort to Curate Software Design Case Studies

Open Design Case Study -- A Crowdsourcing Effort to Curate Software Design Case Studies

Designing a Master Course on Architectures for Big Data: A Collaboration between University and Industry

Self-Confidence of Undergraduate Students in Designing Software Architecture

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