Abstract
The creative act of design has been described as being a wicked or ill-structured problem, in which finding a solution to one aspect may only serve to reveal a more complex problem. The task of designing software offers additional dimensions to this, in that the media is invisible, is capable of almost infinite variations of form, and has both dynamic and static properties. These characteristics provide difficulties when teaching our students about software design, and our ideas about how to do this also tend to be coloured by our experiences in teaching them how to program. In this paper we argue that an approach based on a ‘programming’ metaphor is inadequate for teaching students about designing software, and that the activity of teaching design is not readily amenable to the use of highly structured teaching practices. Indeed, we can therefore identify this too as being an example of a wicked problem.
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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Budgen, D. (1995). Is teaching software design a ‘wicked’ problem too?. In: Ibrahim, R.L. (eds) Software Engineering Education. CSEE 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 895. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58951-1_107
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58951-1_107
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