Software Architecture

Catalog description

The analysis and design of software systems using canonical design patterns. SWENG 421 Software Architecture (3)This course introduces the frequently-used software infrastructures in software development by experienced engineers. The formal UML notations are utilized to design software architecture and help communicate the design visually. Students will learn the real practice of architectural styles, design patterns and design reuse. As to certain complex problems, alternative architectures will be proposed and their design trade offs will be evaluated. For instance, students compare two-tier with three-tier client/server architectures for distributed systems, and employ multi-process and multi-thread concurrent architectures for high performance computation systems. Moreover, students learn to conduct high level quality analysis from the design artifacts. The quality evaluation will focus on a number of attributes, including reusability, extendibility and performance. A great deal of effort is placed on the major categories of design types containing dozens of separate design patterns. Students first review the most fundamental design patterns. Afterwards, they apply creational patterns to effectively create objects, partitioning patterns to categorize objects, structural patterns to allocate objects, behavioral patterns to interface the communication between objects, and concurrent patterns to handle tasks simultaneously. These skills will enable students to extend their own knowledge after graduation by giving them the skills to learn new patters on their own. Finally, students will integrate their programs with native code applications to enlarge the application domains. To achieve best reusability, they also learn modular designs to develop component-based software. These help them meet today's software needs of cross applications and architectures.