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DecidArch Replication Package (HICCS2019)

This repository is a companion page for the following publication:

Jia F. Cai, Patricia Lago, Remco C. De Boer, Philippe Kruchten, and Roberto Verdecchia. 2019. DecidArch: Playing Cards as Software Architects. In Proceeding of HICCS-52: 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, Maui, January 8-11, 2019 (HICSS-52), 10 pages.

The study was designed, developed, and reported by the following investigators:

  • Jia F. Cai (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
  • Patricia Lago (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
  • Remco C. De Boer (ArchiXL)
  • Philippe Kruchten (University of British Columbia)
  • Roberto Verdecchia (Gran Sasso Science Institute & Vrije Univeriteit Amsterdam)

For any information, interested researchers can contact us by writing an email to the corresponding investigator.

Abstract

Teaching software architecture is a challenge because of the difficulty to expose students to actual meaningful design situations. Games can provide a useful illustration of the design decision-making process, and teach students the power of team interaction for making sound decisions.

We introduce a game --DecidArch-- developed at our university to achieve three learning objectives: 1) create awareness about the rationale involved in design decision making, 2) enable appreciation of the reasoning behind candidate design decisions proposed by others, and 3) create awareness about interdependencies between design decisions.

The game has been played by 22 groups with a total of 83 players, all of them students of the software architecture course. We present some of the lessons learned, both from our observation and through participant survey. We conclude that the game well supports our three learning objectives, and we identify several improvement points for future game editions.

Replication material

This repository contains the game, survey, results, and detailed documentation of the research, available here:

  1. DecidArch Game Material.zip - DecidArch game material and rules
  2. DecidArch Student Survey.pdf - Survey adopted for the evaluation of the the learning objectives
  3. Survey Results.csv - Raw data of the survey answers