Teaching Software Architecture Design

Teaching software architecture design in an academic course so that it would equip the students with industrially useful capabilities is challenging. The real software architecture design problems are less clear than what the students are used to learning; the existing mass of assets of an industrial environment is hard to bring into a classroom; and so forth. We have designed a special course into an academic software engineering curriculum, taking into account the industrial needs in teaching the problem of understanding and solving demanding software architecture design problems. The course form is similar to an industrial architecture study assigned to a team of architects. In this paper, we discuss the industrial motivation for the course, the development of the course to its current form, and the lessons learned from running the course.