Dr. Mark Maier not only teaches this class, but is a coauthor of the textbook that has been so successful it is now in its 4th edition.
Prerequisites
A probability or statistics course, e.g. ME EN 2550, CS3130, ECE3530, MATH 3070, BME 3070, MET E 3070, or OSC 2030
Textbook
The Art of Systems Architecting fourth edition by Mark Maier and Eberhardt Rechtin
Student Learning Objectives
Upon successful completion of this course, students shall be able to:
- Identify where architectural decisions occur in typical program scenarios, including Government sponsored contracted developments, incremental commercial developments, major product cycles, and entrepreneurial product developments
- Distinguish architectural and non-architectural design decisions
- Describe the elements of an architecture description document, and distinguish descriptive from decision elements
- Define model-based approaches to constructing architectural views
- Identify and apply domain-specific heuristics in areas such as builder-architected, collaborative, opposed, and software-centric systems
- Demonstrate the application of heuristic and analytical methods to key architectural phases
- Purpose analysis, including user-facing versus builder facing requirements
- Problem structuring, including objective trees and functional versus non-functional objectives
- Solution structuring, including brainstorming techniques and layered models
- Consistency and completeness analysis, at stakeholder and model levels
- Concept selection methods
- Demonstrate application within a domain of realistic scale and complexity
Course Description
Systems Architecting is how we set the purpose of a system, create its conceptual structure, select the development approach, and validate it for use. System Architecting works through stakeholder interaction and conceptual design to determine and trade the primary sources of value, cost, and risk. The course presents best practices for systems architecting through case studies of major system developments (successful or otherwise) and a set of methods to make and describe architecture decisions. Students will learn key architecture heuristics, adapt core systems engineering tools for architecture decision making, and apply both informal and formal description notations.