Modelesis

Summer is in full blow in the northern hemisphere, and, I think, particularly so in the Caribbean.  Family commitments involving plenty of food and the beach, among less glamorous stuff, have kept me silent over here for almost two months now.  This is just a short note to let you all know that I’ve been awarded a research grant from INTEC to work on architecture description languages (ADLs) as tools to assist high-level electronics design.  Read on for some details.

Three months ago, I was teaching a class on Fundamentals of Software Engineering.  This course has a module on Software Architecture, which I typically teach from the Carnegie Mellon SEI perspective.  After teaching it a few times, I had been thinking about better ways to transition students from the “computer-science-first”, code-driven perspective they have when they get to this course, to the more abstract level of thought desirable to properly grasp and reason about software architecture in a structured fashion.  Read on to find out how I reached out to another engineering discipline to achieve this.

As head of the Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering degree at the Santo Domingo Institute of Technology (INTEC), one of the questions I field more often is the difference between this degree and our BSc in Computer Science.  This  second degree is actually named “Information Systems Engineering” (both at INTEC and generally at all Dominican universities), but is typically accredited as a BSc in CS internationally; a recent curricular reform may change that, though, as it is now based on the ACM/IEEE guidelines for Information Systems programs.  I have a variety of resources to answer the question of how they differ, but recently drew on a long tradition of cooking and software development parallels and came up with an explanation that seems to satisfy people more than previous ones.