Software Design Architecture Comparison

Title	Software Design and Architecture Comparison (Eclipse vs Openstack)
Overview	Students will research existing software design documents and resources for both projects and then write a report detailing their differences and helpfulness to various levels of developers.
Prerequisite Knowledge	Students should have: Taken a CS1 course (Introduction to Programming). Already learned syntax and the basics of a programming language. Already learned simple data structures. Rudimentary software design knowledge Could be delivered along-with this activity Ex: Design Patterns knowledge
Learning Objectives	Upon completion, students should: Understand how thoughtful software design is encouraged, or not, in open source communities. Be able to give examples of software design artifacts, and how to go about finding them. Realize what they consider good software design, and be able to back it up with reason. Realize why software design is important, and how it will effect them in their future careers.

Background:

Is there background reading material?

What is the rational for this activity?

For students, who are often novice and beginner developers, it is critical to understand the big-picture when jumping into a new software project. A proper view of the system-wide architecture can bring context on how the entire system works, instead of focus on a particular component. When you can have knowledge of other pieces of the puzzle, you tend to implement better code because it is thoughtful of how your current focus interacts with functionality around it and even to functionality seemingly far-removed. Students need to be aware of why this helps them and their career, how to find this kind of documentation, and that it might shape their opinions and focus when choosing projects to interact with.

Are there any similar activities?

See OpenMRS_Design_Reverse_Engineering_Activity_(Android_App) for an activity that has students reverse engineer a design / architecture from an existing open source Android applications codebase.

Background reading:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/704855/software-design-vs-software-architecture
• http://www.openu.ac.il/personal_sites/download/galezer/SoftwareDesign.pdf
  • This paper describes how they had to get students to re-think how they write code. The students needed to think more outside of the syntax of the actual language, and more toward software design / repeatable design patterns that dont depend on the coding language.
  • I am looking at this paper and thinking about the various tasks or activities that they show were done in their classroom. I may be able to use these ideas.
  • “It should be re-emphasized that practical programming does not play a central role in the unit. At the end of the year students and teachers realized that programming in itself is not the main goal.”
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/268231/how-to-learn-good-software-design-architecture
• http://cc2e.com/
• Code Complete Book - Design chapter
  • ‘Design’ is similar to my definition of ‘software-architecture’, except that design can pervade into lower levels of classes and routines and code
• Gof Design Patterns
• GoF Design Patterns Explained
• Research Paper: Design patterns in open source
• Book: Architecture of Open Source Applications - from Tom
  • http://www.aosabook.org/en/eclipse.html
  • https://wiki.eclipse.org/Learn_About_Eclipse
  • http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Whitepaper-Platform-3.1/eclipse-platform-whitepaper.pdf
  • htp://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/
• Openstack Oslo - from email to listserv
  • https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo#Principles
  • https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo#Design_Proposals
  • http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/oslo-specs/

Directions:

Part 1: Software design background

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Deliverables:

What will the student hand in?

Assessment:

How will the activity be graded?

How will learning will be measured?

Include sample assessment questions/rubrics.

Criteria	Level 1 (fail)	Level 2 (pass)	Level 3 (good)	Level 4 (exceptional)
The purpose of the project
Why the project is open source

Comments:

What should the instructor know before using this activity?

What are some likely difficulties that an instructor may encounter using this activity?

Additional Information:

ACM Knowledge Area/Knowledge Unit	What ACM Computing Curricula 2013 knowledge area and units does this activity cover? ACM_Body_of_Knowledge
ACM Topic	What specific topics are addressed? The Computing Curriucula 2013 provides a list of topics - https://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf
Level of Difficulty	Is this activity easy, medium or challenging?
Estimated Time to Completion	How long should it take for the student to complete the activity?
Materials/Environment	What does the student need? Internet access, IRC client, Git Hub account, LINUX machine, etc.?
Author	Nick Yeates
Source	Is there another activity on which this activity is based? If so, please provide a link to the original resource.
License	Creative Commons CC-BY

Suggestions for Open Source Community:

Suggestions for an open source community member who is working in conjunction with the instructor.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Appendix

Note: Can be removed later, or kept as a resource to teaches looking into other communities.

Software design - Potential communities to look into:

• Look at openshift’s software architecture
  • Software architecture?
  • Talk to someone on the team - get someone who is an expert and quiz them
• GNOME Shell - graphical environment - UI of Fedora - public iterative design to implementation
• GNOME Documents and Photos - iterative design
• Inkscape community
• Hacking and Contributing files
  • https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#-coding-rules
  • https://github.com/openshift/origin/blob/master/HACKING.md
  • https://github.com/colah/ImplicitCAD/blob/master/hacking.md
  • https://github.com/openstack-dev/hacking/blob/master/HACKING.rst
• Openstack design process - blueprints idea, where you write feature and how you want to do it, get sign off from community and then patches are reviewed and go through significant revision
  • Developers Guide - http://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/developers.html
    • http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/project-setup/python.html
    • https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
    • http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/open-community.html#technical-committee-and-ptl-elections
    • https://github.com/openstack-dev/hacking/blob/master/HACKING.rst
    • hacking.md files, Style Guides, Pep8,
  • http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/open-design.html
  • https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Blueprints
  • https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open
  • http://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/developers.html
  • https://review.openstack.org/Documentation/intro-quick.html
  • http://docs.openstack.org/infra/system-config/gerrit.html