Paper Info
Title
A Collaborative Approach to Teaching Software Architecture.
Abstract
Teaching software architecture is hard. The topic is abstract and is best understood by experiencing it, which requires proper scale to fully grasp its complexity. Furthermore, students need to practice both technical and social skills to become good software architects. To overcome these teaching challenges, we developed the Collaborative Software Architecture Course. In this course, participants work together to study and document a large, open source software system of their own choice. In the process, all communication is transparent in order to foster an open learning environment, and the end-result is published as an online book to benefit the larger open source community. We have taught this course during the past four years to classes of 50-100 students each. Our experience suggests that: (1) open source systems can be successfully used to let students gain experience with key software architecture concepts, (2) students are capable of making code contributions to the open source projects, (3) integrators (architects) from open source systems are willing to interact with students about their contributions, (4) working together on a joint book helps teams to look beyond their own work, and study the architectural descriptions produced by the other teams.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3017680.3017737
SIGCSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
software architecture, software engineering education, open learning, collaborative book writing
Personal software process,Computer science,Software architecture description,Software peer review,Knowledge management,Resource-oriented architecture,Software architecture,Team software process,Multimedia,Software development,Social software engineering
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.40
8
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
A. van Deursen14034254.98
Mauricio Finavaro Aniche211812.79
Joop Aué370.78
Rogier Slag480.84
Michael de Jong560.78
Alex Nederlof6211.51
Eric Bouwers7959.51