Teaching Software Architectures

The traditional way to begin talking about something is to outline the history, broad principles, and the like. When someone does that at a conference, I get sleepy most of the times. My mind starts wandering with a low-priority background process that polls the speaker until he or she gives an example. The examples wake me up because it is with examples that I can see what is going on. With principles it is too easy to make generalizations, too hard to figure out how to apply things. An example helps make things clear.

So is with teaching and more so teaching IT. I wasted a Semester of sitting dumb in a class of Software Architecture where my teacher only talked about different architectures / models. I never figured out how architecting works in programming until I worked out the carefully crafted examples. Only ‘doing’– ‘not sitting in a class listening’ - that has finally given me a sense of the process of architectures and afterwards, the lecture slides.

Again what I mean by ‘carefully crafted’ examples? If I pick a large program, describing its architectural design can become too complicated for any student to work through. (I tried and even a slightly complicated example runs to more than a hundred pages.) However, if I pick a program that is small enough to be comprehensible, architecture does not look like it is worthwhile. Thus I favour a classic mix of describing techniques that are useful for real-world scenarios.