CS 181c: Software Design and Architecture

Spring 2002

Tuesday Evenings 6:30-9:30 PM

BK B134

Overview

The objective of this class is for students to be able to describe and reason about software systems at an architectural level. The focus will be on the abstract organization of software system elements, from small-scale class collections through large-scale product families, with the goal of finding a decomposition of elements which satisfies certain properties. Students will be encouraged to form their own opinions on what constitutes a set of principles for good architecture, and will be expected to create and defend architectures relative to a set of principles. We will emphasize emergent properties such as maintainability, reliability, security, performance, etc., whereas system correctness will be assumed. We will also focus on abstractions and will touch only briefly on software architecture notations, languages, and management processes.

CS 121 (Software Development) is recommended as a prerequisite for this class. Grading for the class will be determined from homework assignments and a final project. There will be no final exam.

Outline

• Introduction to the various elements of software architecture at various levels of abstraction, formalization of what it means for an architecture to be ``good,'' and a preview of some methods for creating and evaluating an architecture.
• A detailed walk through various design principles, taken from various schools of thought, including:

  • structured methods
  • information modeling
  • object-oriented design
  • component-oriented design
  • patterns and pattern languages
  In this part of the course we will review and extend some of the material from CS 121.
• Architectural connection and architectural styles.
• Product lines, application frameworks, and component-based systems.
• Architectural design quality and evaluation
• Final project presentations

Instructor

Bob Varney
Software Engineering Manager
Teradyne, Inc.
(818) 874-7519
varney@teradyne.com