Exploration on Theoretical and Practical Projects of Software Architecture Course

It has been widely recognized that software architecture is one of the hard courses to teach in software engineering. First, it is usually difficult to update the knowledge written in textbooks with the rapidly developed practical progress. Accordingly, we need to teach students how to follow the state-of-the-art research works within both academic and industrial context. Secondly, due to the fact that students are lacking practical experience on the design and development of large-scale systems, it is difficult for them to deeply understand the theory and rationality of software architecture. Accordingly, we need to teach students how to cope with practical problems based on the learnt theoretical work. This paper presents our exploration on designing theoretical and practical projects of software architecture course for postgraduate students during the last ten years. We aim to improve students’ ability to investigate cutting-edge achievements and concerns in academia and industry, to understand, analyze, and design industrial software architecture based on open-source systems. Furthermore, we expect and encourage students’ potential to become software architects. This paper details our project setup and discusses the feedbacks, and shows the benefits of our projects.