Software Architecture (IN4315) 2018

Arie van Deursen, Maurício Aniche, Andy Zaidman

In this website, we keep track of all information relevant to the IN4135 software architecture course:

• Course material (pointers to literature, etc)
• The course schedule
• The course assignments
• The grading criteria
• The way of working
• The course faq

Background

A course description is provided in our blog post covering the course in the academic year 2012/2013 and our SIGCSE paper that describes that 2016 edition.

The goal of this course is to learn what it means to be an architect, and to acquire the necessary skills for becoming a successful architect. To that end, we will study available literature, and apply it to actual open source projects.

The course will be fully based on GitHub, and follow a similar approach as previous years:

1. You will work in teams of 4 on an existing GitHub project of choice
2. You will contribute to this project by means of architectural documentation for concerns your project is struggling with.

Thus, in total 15-20 teams will work intensively on an existing architecture, for the period of exactly one quarter.

The main outcome of your team work will be a chapter of around 5000 words providing a new architectural description of the system you are studying. All chapters will be combined into a joint book, titled Delft Students on Software Architecture (codename DESOSA). The book will contain a selection of chapters, each contributed by one team – see the DESOSA 2016 and DESOSA 2017 book available.

The DESOSA book is directly inspired by the Architecture of Open Source Applications book series. Each book in this series is a collection of architectural descriptions of important software systems.

It is up to the contributing teams to decide whether to actually make their chapter public – but we hope to have many high quality chapters that we can proudly present on the DESOSA site.