SENG  422 Summer 99
SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

Instructor

  Dr. Peter Walsh
  EOW 308
  pwalsh@csr.csc.uvic.ca
  721-8790
  Office Hours: TBA

Lecture Times and Places

Cle A 207
Wed/Thurs 6:30 - 8:00

Syllabus

Architectural design of complex software systems.  Commonly-used
software system structures, techniques for designing and implementing
these structures, models and formal notations for characterizing and
reasoning about architectures, tools for generating specific instances
of an architecture, and case studies of actual system architectures.
Skills needed to evaluate the architectures of existing systems and to
design new systems in principled ways using well-founded architectural
paradigms. Role of Standards.

Objectives

Architectures for Software Systems aims to teach you how to design,
understand, and evaluate systems at an architectural level of
abstraction. By the end of the course you should be able to:

     Recognize major architectural styles in existing software systems. 
     Describe an architecture accurately. 
     Generate architectural alternatives for a problem and choose among them. 
     Construct a medium-sized software system that satisfies an
        architectural specification.  
     Use existing definitions and development tools to expedite such
        tasks.  
     Understand the formal definition of a number of architectures and
        be able to reason precisely about the properties of those
        architectures.  
     Use domain knowledge to specialize an architecture
        for a particular family of applications.

Text

Software Architecture in Practice, by Len Bass, Paul Clements, and Rick
Kazman, published by Addison-Wesley in 1998.

Grading

Questions on Assigned Readings              25%
   to be answered by each student
   and graded on a pass/fail basis
Assignments [max of 5 assignments]          15%
   to be attempted by each student team
Project                                     30%
   to be completed by each student team,
   includes report and presentation
In Class Exams [3]                          30%
   to be completed by each student

Final Grade

The final grade will be obtained from the following percentage to grade
point conversion:

90 <= A+ <= 100
85 <= A  <  90
80 <= A- <  85
75 <= B+ <  80
70 <= B  <  75
65 <= B- <  70
60 <= C+ <  65
55 <= C  <  60
50 <= D  <  55
35 <= E  <  50 (fail; conditional supplemental exam)
      F  <  35 (fail; no supplemental exam)
      N (did not complete the course requirements; no supplemental exam)