Experience with a Course on Architectures for Software Systems

As software systems grow in size and complexity their design problem extends beyond algorithms and data structures to issues of system design. This area receives little or no treatment in existing computer science curricula. Although courses about specific systems are usually available, there is no systematic treatment of the organizations used to assemble components into systems. These issues — the software architecture level of software design — are the subject of a new course that we taught for the first time in Spring 1992. This paper describes the motivation for the course, the content and structure of the current version, and our plans for improving the next version.