Educating Architects in Industry - The SAP Architecture Curriculum

Abstract

Software architects play an important role especially when software products of high complexity are created and extended by a massive division of labor. As Europe's largest Software Company producing business software, SAP has specific requirements for the skill set of software architects. Since the tasks of software architects vary to a large degree, defining the core skills of software architects was a prerequisite for education. Furthermore, the education of future architects by external parties was also not an option since the majority of the content has to be adapted to the company’s needs. Starting 2008, SAP has set up an Architecture Curriculum for the on-the-job education of future Software Architects. The curriculum reflects the typical tasks of Architects in a large software company, which deal with communicating architecture topics among various stakeholders, and with the definition of architecture – ensuring conceptual integrity and considering the big number of quality (aka non-functional) requirements. SAP already runs (or will run in the near future) this curriculum in all major development locations. The success and the positive feedback of the participants show that the concept of an on-the-job education works and that it can be applied to other software companies as well.