Designing a Reference Architecture for a Collaborative Software Production and Learning Environment

Software engineering is both a body of knowledge and a competence, thus its teaching requires students to get involve in actual software development. For this purpose, a teaching-learning controlled software production environment can be designed. Typically, this environment has been designed as a learning software factory whit focus on the processes, which may lead to a narrowed understanding of the information systems technology required for its successful implementation, operation, and management. We present an ongoing design science research aimed to improve the design of modern Collabo-rative Software Production teaching-Learning Environments (CSPLE) by using a set of models to describe not only its pro-cesses, but also the information generated by the processes, the software applications used to support the processes execution and the technological infrastructure required to run the applications. These models describing a CSPLE correspond to a set of archi-tectural views compounding an enterprise architecture that can be used as a reference to design specific CSPLE in the context of a practical software engineering course. A preliminary result presented in this paper is a method to design an Enterprise Reference Architecture (ERA) for a CSPLE. The proposed method is also applied giving as empirical highlights about the design of an ERA for a CSPLE.