Fostering an effective learning environment in large classes is a challenge: instructors and teaching assistants are stretched thin across many students, students often lack opportunities for personal interaction with course staff, and the size of the classes makes them seem impersonal. Furthermore, students in large classes can often find solutions to their labs and assignments online or copy them from other students, diminishing their impetus to learn and raising plagiarism concerns.

The Views and Beyond (V&B) approach to software architecture provides practical guidance on the what, why, and how of creating IEEE 1471-2000 compliant documentation for your software architecture that will be used for years to come. The approach is based on the well-known concept of views and is presented in the context of prevailing prescriptive models for architecture, including the unified process and UML 2.0, which has improved support for representing key architectural elements over its predecessors. In this paper, students will be introduced to the views and beyond approach and will gain hands-on experience creating a new architectural style using the V&B style guide and learn how to document an architectural view in that style using the V&B view template. This paper concludes with a discussion of tool support for architectural documentation and a demo of a Web-based documentation system.

WICSA is a working conference and in 2005 continued the tradition of providing working sessions as a forum supportive of communication among the diverse population that makes up the software architecture community. The working sessions of WICSA 5 reflected on the achievements in the field of software architecture during the past decade, took stock of the current state of the field, and identified opportunities for researchers to contribute to improving the practice.

This lecture maps the concepts and templates explored in this tutorial with well-known architectural prescriptions, including the 4+1 approach of the Rational Unified Process, the Siemens Four Views approach, and the ANSI/IEEE-1471-2000 recommended best practice for documenting architectures for software-intensive systems. The lecture concludes by re-capping the highlights of the tutorial, and asking for feedback.

This report gives an overview of the 6th ICSE Workshop on Component-Based Software Engineering held at 25th International Conference on Software Engineering. The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners from three communities: component technology, software architecture, and software certification. The primary goal of the workshop was to continue clarifying the concepts, identifying the main challenges and findings of predictable assembly of certifiable software components. This report gives a comprehensive summary of the position papers, of the workshop, its findings, and its results.

This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from the community interested in predictable assembly from certifiable components. The goal of this workshop is to ensure continued collaboration among the members of this community. One output of the workshop will be an understanding of composition theory and how it applies to community model problems that were suggested at the workshop on component-based software engineering held at ICSE in 2001. A second output will be the identification of research opportunities that lie on the perimeter of predictable assembly.

The emergence of formal software architecture description languages provides an opportunity to perform analyses at high levels of abstraction, as well as early in the development process. Previous research has primarily focused on developing techniques such as algebraic and transition-system analysis to detect component mismatches or global behavioral incorrectness. In this paper we motivate the utility and describe the challenges in developing a different kind of analysis for use at the architectural level, namely dependence analysis. Various kinds of dependence analyses have been used widely at the implementation level to aid program optimization, anomaly checking, program understanding, testing, and debugging. However, the languages used for architectural description offer quite different features than the languages for which traditional dependence analysis techniques have been developed. We describe our initial approach to architecture-level dependence analysis and illustrate that approach through a prototype tool we have built, called Aladdin, to automatically perform the analysis.