Exploring experiential learning model and risk management process for an undergraduate software architecture course

• Main Authors: OUH, Eng Lieh, IRAWAN, Yunghans
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: software architecture; experiential learning; risk management process; active learning; Computer and Systems Architecture; Higher Education; Software Engineering; Systems Architecture
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4170; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5173/viewcontent/exploring_experiential_learning.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper shares our insights on exploring theexperiential learning model and risk management process todesign an undergraduate software architecture course. The keychallenge for undergraduate students to appreciate softwarearchitecture design is usually their limited experience in thesoftware industry. In software architecture, the high-level designprinciples are heuristics lacking the absoluteness of firstprinciples which for inexperienced undergraduate students, thisis a frustrating divergence from what they used to value. From aneducator's perspective, teaching software architecture requirescontending with the problem of how to express this level ofabstraction practically and also make the learning realistic. Inthis paper, we propose a model adapting the concepts ofexperiential learning and risk management to design the courseon software architecture. The lesson plan promotes activelearning with activities to observe how different parts of aninformation systems architecture work, experience the impact ofreal software quality issues or risks arise, reflect on the rootcauses of these risks, conceptualize and subsequently implementthe countermeasure to mitigate the risk. We divide the courseinto first session conducted based on the traditional lectureformat and second session based on our proposed experientialrisk learning model. We evaluate the feedback ratings of 128undergraduate students of an information system program forthe two sessions and perform sentiment analysis on theircomments. We also generalize the applicability of ourexperiential risk learning model to courses in other domains ofsoftware engineering. The key contribution of this paper is theexperiential risk learning model. We hope that this modelalleviates the challenge to design a software architecture coursefor undergraduates and can be used as another teaching methodfor active learning.