Introduction to Software Architecture

This lecture, recorded at the University of Colorado Boulder in September 2012, is an introduction to the major concepts of software architecture. The audience consisted of 70 seniors majoring in computer science. It is based on material taken from the book Just Enough Software Architecture.

Most developers have no formal education in software architecture, yet a system's architecture has a big influence on its success. Software architecture has been intensively studied for more than twenty years now and studying it will help you do a better job of designing systems, give you names for the concepts and patterns, and help you choose between competing designs.

Slides: http://georgefairbanks.com/assets/pdf...
Book hardback: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0984618104
e-Book: http://georgefairbanks.com/e-book/

Major topics covered in this lecture include:

Architects focus on system qualities
Tradeoffs
Architecture, architecting, architects
Views
Quality attributes
Analysis
Standard notations
Guiderails
Architectural styles
Conceptual model
Engineering with models
Canonical model structure
Models and code
Process and risk

The pacing of the lecture is considerably slower than when I give this lecture to industry practitioners because undergraduates need to be provided with more examples to ground the lessons. This lecture was just over 2 hours but with a different audience it would be about 75 minutes.

I hope you enjoy it.