Teaching a Course on Software Architecture

Software architecture is a relatively new topic in software engineering. It is quickly becoming a central issue, and leading-edge organizations spend a considerable fraction of their development effort on software architecture. Consequently, software architecture is increasingly often the topic of a dedicated course in software engineering curricula. There are two general flavors as for the contents of such a course. One flavor emphasizes the programming-in-the-large aspects of software architecture and concentrates on design and architectural patterns, architecture description languages and the like. The other emphasizes the communication aspects of software architecture to a variety of stakeholders, thereby acknowledging a broader view of software architecture. In this paper we report our experiences with two master-level courses in software architecture that focus on these communication aspects. We show that, by appropriately focusing the contents of such a course, key aspects of this industrially very relevant field within software engineering can be taught successfully in a university setting