A Template for SOA Design Decision Making in an Educational Setting

An effective software design should ensure that all the quality requirements of a system of interest are supported. As the architecture of a software system can be seen as a set of architectural design decisions (ADDs), the identification of design issues and the choice of design alternatives heavily impact the quality of software systems. This is especially challenging in service orientation for which students need to change their mindset from system design to service-oriented design. In this paper, we present a template driven approach for documenting quality-driven ADDs in an educational setting. We next report on our experience with the usage of the template in a service-oriented software design Master course given over the past three years. We found that the template not only offers a framework guiding the students in their design but also encourages them to make sound ADDs, which leads to a service-oriented design with higher quality.