Abstract: As software systems grow in size and complexity their design problem extends beyond algorithms and data structures to issues of system design. This area receives little or no treatment in existing computer science curricula. Although courses about specific systems are usually available there is no systematic treatment of the organizations used to assemble components into systems. These issues - the software architecture level of software design - are the subject of a new course that we taught for the first time in Spring 1992. This paper describes the motivation for the course, the content and structure of the current version, and our plans for improving the next version.

Abstract: An important goal in software engineering is to describe complex software systems at an architectural level of abstraction. While there are many useful architectural paradigms (pipes, blackboards, etc.) they are typically understood only idiomatically and applied in an ad hoc fashion. We show how a formal model allows us to say precisely what we mean by a software architecture, explore its properties, and systematically describe instances of the architecture. We illustrate the approach using the well-known example of pipe-filter architectures.