Forming software architects in early stages: From craft to engineering

Software Architecture is the highest level design of the structure of a program or a computer system. The increase of the complexity of the systems and the major importance that the qualit attributes acquire, needs increasingly to include, in early stages, aspects of modelling and paradigms of programming. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence shows that the initial formation in courses of programming is centred on aspects of language and sintaxis more than in the modeling one of the solutions. The aim of this article is to describe a methodological approach that is being used in the first courses of programming in the University of La Frontera. This approach allows to include the design of a computational solution as principal focus. A problem solving methodology called Rapid & Global (R&G) is used to teach how to program and to facilitate the incorporation of computational concepts and paradigms of programming used in Architecture of Software. Our work shows three important results: (i) The students understand and use safely, in early stages, computational terminology as object oriented, abstraction, classes and methods; (ii) There is recognized and understands the importance of the design (modeling of the solution) in the construction of computational solutions as it increases the complexity and; (iii) The computational solutions obtained are documented, easy to read, to modify and independent from the language. This article shows that it is possible to change the paradigm with which students are formed in programming, changing the installed practice of teaching programming languages as a basis to solve problems, by a practice of modeling the solution and then writing the code.