Rick Kazman is a Professor at the University of Hawaii and a Visiting Researcher at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. His primary research interests are software architecture, design and analysis tools, software visualization, and software engineering economics. Kazman has been involved in the creation of several highly influential methods and tools for architecture analysis, including the SAAM (Software Architecture Analysis Method), the ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method), the CBAM (Cost-Benefit Analysis Method) and the Dali and Titan tools.
Reflections on Teaching Architecture Design
Architecture design is notoriously difficult to teach and to learn. Most competent architects in industry have deep knowledge won from long years of experience. But if we want architecture design to be methodical and repeatable, we need better ways of teaching it. Simply waiting for an aspiring young architect to accumulate 10 or 20 years of experience is not acceptable if we believe that software engineering is a true engineering discipline that can be taught and learned in a reasonable time-frame. In this talk I will describe my experiences based on over 20 years of teaching software architecture design (and analysis), to both undergraduates and industry professionals. I will reflect on three aspects of teaching design, each of which was a major “lesson learned” for me: 1) the need for a methodical approach to design, 2) role-playing and game-play as a means of engaging learners to learn a method, and 3) tool-support for teaching.
Rick will also host a workshop in the ASEE&T program section of the conference.