Teaching architectural design in an undergraduate software engineering curriculum

In the fall of 1996, the Rochester Institute of Technology (USA) began admitting students to the nations first baccalaureate program in software engineering. One of the curriculum's primacy themes is software design, ranging from the very concrete (e.g., code, data structures and algorithms) to the more abstract (e.g., subsystems, architectural designs). At each of these levels the authors are able to address the variety of software quality issues that arise at different points in the software development process. This paper describes the structure of their introductory course in software architectures and their experience teaching it. They also speculate on how the course could evolve over time.