A Design Quality Learning Unit in OO Modeling Bridging the Engineer and the Artist

Recent IS curriculum guidelines compress software development pedagogy into smaller and smaller pockets of course syllabi. Where undergraduate IS students once may have practiced modeling in analysis, design, and implementation across six or more courses in a curriculum using a variety of languages and tools they commonly now experience modeling in four or fewer courses in at most a couple of paradigms. And in most of these courses their modeling decisions focus on acceptable syntax rather than principles representing and communicating concepts of quality in information systems. Where learning design quality may once have been an osmotic side effect of development practice it must now be a conscious goal in pedagogy if it is to be taught at all. This paper presents a learning unit that teaches design quality in object-oriented models. The focus on object-oriented models allows the learning to permeate analysis, design, and implementation enriching pedagogy across the systems development life cycle. The quality perspective presented is more expansive than that usually found in software engineering, the traditional "objective" notion of metrics, and integrates aspects of aesthetics, the more subjective phenomena of satisfaction. This learning unit is intended as an adaptable framework to be tailored to the coursework and the overall objectives of specific IS programs.