University courses on software architecture

At the time I was doing my MSc at University of Mining and Metallurgy Cracow, Poland (now called University of Technology), there was no such course in the curriculum (and probably this has not changed since 2003 :)).

However you can find a lot of such courses on universites around the world. Below is a bunch of these I gathered some time ago. Most of them provides a decent introduction to Software Architecture (more theoretical side I suppose), its concepts, language, approaches etc. I suggest starting with the older ones (like by Shaw, or Kazman), than take some 2005 ones, and the latest at the end :). All links will point you to sites with course slides, handouts, assignments, etc.

• Classic introductional presentation by M.Shaw and D.Garlan (1997): http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/tinker-arch/www/html/Tutorial_Slides/Soft_Arch/quick_index.html


• University of Waterloo, Rick Kazman (1995): http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~rnkazman/746.html


• Univeristy of Stuttgart, Software Architectures (2005): http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/teaching/ss-05/SWArch/entry.html


• University of Southern California (USC), Software Archiectures (2005): http://csse.usc.edu/classes/cs578_2005/#overview


• University of Minnesota, Introduction to Software Architecture (2007): http://www-users.itlabs.umn.edu/classes/Fall-2007/seng5861/


• University of Arhus, Advance Topics in Software Architecture (2007): http://www.daimi.au.dk/ATiSA/


• Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), Software Architecture (2008): http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~chalin/courses/winter/SOEN344/home.html


• University of Calgary, Analysis and design of Large Scale Software (2008): http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/far/Lectures/SENG401/index.html

There is always one master and one apprentice....

Well, maybe not exactly :). There are plenty of software architects around. And it is always beneficial to study what they have to say (its better to learn from someone else mistakes after all :)).

But seriously, i've tried to gather some subjective mix of software architects, as a base for my studies in the topic. Following OPML file (exported from Google Reader) contains RSS feeds of various architect's blogs including architects from Microsoft, IBM, Siemens, eBay, Amazon, etc, also some architecture related podcasts: http://sites.google.com/site/architectwannabe/Home/architects_rss_feeds.xml?attredirects=0

I will update it on random basis (as i find something interesting).

So here I am

Yes, i want to become a software architect at some point :). I'm coming from the world of network management, with 5 years experience in development and maintainance of large, distributed and heterogenous network management system.


At some point in the past i did a study of this domain (methodologies, models, standards, products, sub-domains, etc.) and I thought it was a vast land.





But now, when half through gathering materials to dive into software architecture domain, I can see that SA spans even wider area with even higher number of different perspectives.

It is hard to tackle this topic without being easily locked to some specific language or technology (or hype :)). On the other hand it is hard to stay technology agnostic without the risk of levitating too much to the ivory tower tops.

From what I have learned so far, SA is an aspect of software engineering, that spans through variety of sometimes orthogonal topics. In other words, as a software architect you ought to have a broad (but not necessarily too deep) knowledge on every possible topic related to software development and even beyond that.


This might be discouraging at the beginning, especially that if you want to get some knowledge on SA from the web (or books), there is a lot of noise out there :).

So in this blog im going to post various links to (IMHO) valuable materials for aspiring architects :). They will include architecture and architect blogs, podcasts, articles, etc.

The topics will include:
- software design,
- software architecture (patterns, good practices, etc.)
- software development lifecycle (process, methodology, techniques),
- technology (beware, as im biased a bit towards Java, and i decided to choose this one as my tool of trade).