School of Computer Science,
Professor.
Course newsgroup. uw.cs.cs746
Course email. cs746@swag.uwaterloo.ca
Organizational meeting. Thursday, September 14, 2006.
DC3314
Meetings. Thursdays, 4:00-6:30, DC3314
Web
site. http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~holt/cs/746/06
Description. This is a seminar course that
reviews current literature on software architecture.
Prerequisites. There is no formal course
prerequisite. However, students are expected to be familiar with the problems of
structuring large, complex software systems. Courses such as CS446 and CS445
may be useful background, but are not required. Some industrial experience may
be helpful.
Seminar
organization.
The course will be run as a sequence of seminars in which papers relating to
software architecture are discussed.
Moderator. In a typical meeting of the class,
we will discuss one to three papers. Before hand, one class member, called the
"moderator", will be chosen for each paper. The moderator will
introduce the paper to the class, and make sure that the relevant points in the
paper are clarified in the discussion. Points in the paper should be related to
points in other papers. Ideally, there will be 20 minutes for the
presentations, followed by a 10-15 minute discussion on the paper. Before the
class, the moderator is to attempt to find and study the web pages of the
article's author(s). A tentative schedule for papers being covered can be found
at http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~holt/cs/746/06/schedule.html.
Participation. All participants are to read each
article before the meeting that discusses the article. All participants have
the responsibility to see that they and other participants get the maximum
benefit from the discussions.
Assignments. The course
assignments are covered in a separate web page.
Project. Each student or team of students
will do a project along the theme of software architecture. Ideally, this will
involve practical work, such as investigating the architecture of an actual
software system, or building demo tools for displaying software architecture
structures. Some sample topics can be found at http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~holt/cs/746/03/project.html
.
Project
presentation.
Each student or team will present their project during the last few weeks of
class. Presentations are to be professional quality, with well prepared slides,
beginning with a clear statement of the area of
interest, and proceeding to an easy-to-follow technical presentation. Presenter
should hand out hardcopy of slides at beginning of presentation. On the last
day of class, each student or team is to turn in their project paper.
Text: The text that is closest to this
material is Shaw and Garlan's book on Software Architecture. However, their
book serves primarily as background and does not cover the breadth of this
course.
Marking
scheme: Class
participation 15, Presentation of papers 15, Assignments 30, Course project 40,
TOTAL 100.
Last revised 29 Aug
2006, RCH