Teaching advanced software design in team-based project course

Skillful design remains one of the critical success factors in long-lived software projects. Design fundamentals have been established and are pretty stable. How do we teach design in-the-large to equip our graduates with design skills relevant to a plethora of changing software technologies and emerging new application domains? Today programs are built on top of functionalities provided by software platforms. Most often, developers extend existing systems rather than develop from scratch. Programming with application program interfaces (API) that allow newly written code to call middleware or existing application software has become a norm in software industries. While the details of API mechanisms heavily depend on a specific platform or application, the principles behind API design are universal, and can be taught in project courses designed for that purpose. Working knowledge of API design principles helps students faster adapt to new and changing technologies. In the paper, we describe a teaching methodology and 10 years of experiences teaching advanced design in a team-based software engineering project course. Our course builds around fundamental concepts in API design and use.