Architecture and Design Intent: An Experience Report

As part of a graduate course on software architecture and design intent, we designed a class project in which teams of students performed software engineering tasks that required them to understand the design of an open source project and evolve the architectural design in response to a set of additional functional requirements. The students used intent-based design approaches and notation systems to document intent for architectural design features. We use the students' experiences with these methodologies to explore the potential usefulness of intent-based modeling approaches to system architecture, and also to gain insight into directions for further research.