Target Audience:

Software professionals with programming and design experience.

Schedule:

Three sessions, 2-hour each.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Understand software design principles.
• Visualize, measure, monitor, and measure software quality and productivity.
• Understand and visualize design patterns and anti-patterns.
• Identify true design debt and analyze return on investment.

Course Outline:

Module 1: Foundations of Software Design and Architecture (1 hour)

• Design Principles
  • Making decisions in a principled way
  • Core design principles for value addition
  • The Power of Abstraction and the Value of Modularity
• Design Structure Matrix (DSM)
  • Understand and model software dependencies
  • Understand and assess design structures
  • Design rules and modules in a DSM

Module 2: Visualize Design Principles (1 hour)

• Design Principles in DSM
  • Information Hiding in DSM
  • SOLID in DSM
  • Design Rule Space
• Design Patterns in DSM
  • Design patterns overview
  • Design Rule in patterns
  • Modules created by patterns

Module 3: Monitoring and Measuring (1 hour)

• Software Metrics
  • Code metrics: LOC, cyclomatic complexity, etc.
  • Design metrics: propagation cost (PC) and Decoupling Level (DL) (m-score)
• Monitor Software Evolution
  • Monitor design structure evolution
  • Monitor productivity and quality evolution

Module 4: Design/Architecture Debt (1 hour)

• Identify True Debt
  • Technical debt overview
  • Design/Architecture anti-patterns/hotspot
  • Static code analysis tools (e.g., SonarQube, ESLint).
• Quantify Design Debt
  • Calculate debt penalty
  • Calculate return on investment (ROI)
• How to Remove Design Debt
  • Improve/introduce design rules and modules based on future change expectations

Module 5: Industrial Case Studies (1 hour)

• ABB (2018)—Compare and Measure Multiple projects.
• Brightsquid (2019)—Make refactoring decisions and assess refactoring outcome.
• Google (2025)—Monitor complexity, productivity, and developer sentiment.

Module 6: Hands-on Analysis / Presentation (1 hour)

• Model a real project using DV8
• Measure design structure and productivity
• Identify design debt

Materials Provided:

• Pre-configured repositories for in-class examples/exercises.
• Book chapters
• State-of-the-art research publications