Developing an Architecture-Focused Measurement Framework for Managing Technical Debt

Managing technical debt, which refers to the rework and degraded quality resulting from overly hasty delivery of software capabilities to users, is an increasingly critical aspect of producing cost-effective, timely, and high-quality software products. A delicate balance is needed between the desire to release new software capabilities rapidly to satisfy users and the desire to practice sound software engineering that reduces rework.  This blog post at the SEI blog by Ipek Ozkaya discusses how an architecture-focused analysis approach helps manage technical debt by enabling software engineers to decide the best time to rearchitect—in other words, to pay down the technical debt.

Rick Kazman on Evaluating Software Architectures

Evaluating software architectures is a critical part of software architecture life-cycle processes. The book Evaluating Software Architectures: Methods and Case Studies covers the software architecture evaluation topic in detail focusing on evaluation frameworks such as Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM), Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM), and Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs (ARID). The authors also discuss in the book some case studies in applying these frameworks as well as comparison of the software architecture evaluation methods.

InfoQ spoke with Rick Kazman, Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and a co-author of the book, about the significance of evaluating software architectures and how to perform the architecture evaluations in Agile and Lean software-development organizations. They also talked to him about the emerging trends.

Read InfoQ’s interview with Rick Kazman.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Stal and Hunt to Keynote the SATURN 2012 Conference

Michael Stal and Andy Hunt, two leading thinkers in the fields of software architecture and software engineering, will deliver keynote presentations at the SATURN 2012 conference. SATURN is the Software Engineering Institute’s annual conference devoted to software and systems architecture. SATURN 2012 will be held May 7-11, 2012 at the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Michael Stal is principal engineer at Siemens Corporate Research and Technologies. His main research topics address software architecture for distributed and/or embedded systems. He coaches projects within the various business units at Siemens and is in charge of educating the Siemens senior software architects. Stal earned a PhD from the University of Groningen where he has been appointed professor for software engineering. In addition, Stal co-authored the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture (POSA) book series.

Andy Hunt is a programmer turned consultant, author, and publisher. Hunt was one of the 17 founders of the Agile Alliance and also one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. He co-founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf, publishing award-winning and critically-acclaimed books for software developers. He also has authored award-winning and best-selling books, including The Pragmatic Programmer, co-written by Dave Thomas, and six other books, including the his latest, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.

In line with the SATURN 2012 conference theme “Architecture: Catalyst for Collaboration,” both keynote speakers will explore how practitioners can collaborate effectively across geographical, cultural, and technical boundaries to solve system problems.

See the SATURN 2012 website in January 2012 for more details about the keynote addresses as well as the preliminary conference program.

Workshop on Managing Technical Debt at ICSE 2012

On June 5, 2012 we will be organizing a workshop co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2012) in Zurich to scrutinize the diverse issues that are related to technical debt and the software development lifecycle. The details of the call for papers and other logistics are at our workshop site. We invite practitioners and researchers to join us in discussing early findings, future directions, experiences, and results.

An initial workshop was held at the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh on June 2–4, 2010. The outcomes of this workshop and open research questions are outlined in the position paper Managing Technical Debt in Software-Reliant Systems presented at the FSE/SDP 2010 Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering Research. The second workshop was held collocated with ICSE 2011. A summary of the workshop is available in the September 2011 issue of ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes.

The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the software development community, as a way to understand and communicate issues of intrinsic quality, value, and cost. The idea is that developers sometimes accept compromises in a system in one dimension (such as modularity) to meet an urgent demand in some other dimension (such as a deadline), and that such compromises incur a debt on which interest has to be paid and which should be repaid at some point for the long-term health of the project.

Record Number of Abstract Submissions for SATURN 2012

The SATURN technical committee and I are delighted by the number of people who showed interest in presenting at SATURN 2012 by submitting abstracts in response to our call for submissions. We had our highest number of abstracts ever this year, 92!, far exceeding our previous high of 73 submissions last year. Clearly there is growing interest in software architecture and in the SATURN Conference. The topic of this year’s conference–Architecture: Catalyst for Collaboration–spurred authors to submit on a wide variety of topics, including traditional uses of architecture (such as in coordinating large, distributed, or challenging projects), as well as more recent developments such as using architecture in Agile design evolution, outsourcing, and coordinating multiple Agile projects.

In the next several weeks, the program committee will be reviewing these proposals and crafting a high-quality technical program for SATURN 2012. We plan to notify presenters sometime during the first week in January about the status of their submissions. With such a large number of submissions, the conference must be more selective, and the acceptance percentage will be lower this year than in past years. My quick scan of the abstracts tells me that we will have some difficult decisions to make.

Thank you for your interest and engagement with SATURN 2012. We look forward to seeing you in St. Petersburg, Fl. May 7-11.

George Fairbanks
Technical Program Chair, SATURN 2012

Join the SEI Architecture Team

The mission of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is to improve the practice of software engineering worldwide. The SEI Research, Technology, and System Solutions (RTSS) Program conducts and applies research on the structure and behavior of systems. Working at the SEI provides staff members with the opportunity to build a strong reputation in their chosen fields, interact with world-class colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, and have a seminal and lasting influence on an emerging body of technical research and practice.

The RTSS Program at the SEI is currently seeking qualified candidates for positions with the Advanced Mobile Systems and Architecture Practices teams.

Here is more information about open positions with the SEI RTSS Program.

Abstracts for SATURN 2012 Due by November 30

The deadline for submitting presentation and tutorial abstracts for the SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) 2012 Conference is quickly approaching.

As a presenter at SATURN 2012, you have the opportunity not only to gather feedback from peers and gain valuable experience to boost your résumé, but also to have your presentation considered for publishing in a future issue of IEEE Software magazine. On top of that, conference speakers also receive 40% off full-conference registration.

The conference committee is accepting abstracts on a variety of topics that align with the conference theme “Architecture: Catalyst for Collaboration,” which will aim to explore how effective collaboration across geographical, cultural, and technical boundaries is increasingly prevalent and essential to system success. Potential topics include

•    collaboration in software development, for example, architecture in an Agile project
•    collaboration in the context of mobile computing, cloud computing, social networking, open frameworks, and service-oriented architecture
•    knowledge management for effective collaboration
•    systems of systems and ultra-large-scale systems: how to achieve collaboration across independently funded and managed organizations
•    multi-agent systems and collaboration among non-human entities such as software and networks
•    collaborative design and architecture tools

The deadline to submit your abstract is November 30, 2011. Share your knowledge and experience with the software architecture community by responding to the call for submissions today.

Interview and Book Review: Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond, 2nd Edition (InfoQ)

Software architecture—the conceptual glue that holds every phase of a project together for its many stakeholders—is widely recognized as a critical element in modern software development. Practitioners have increasingly discovered that close attention to a software system’s architecture pays valuable dividends. Without an architecture that is appropriate for the problem being solved, a project will stumble along or, most likely, fail. Even with a superb architecture, if that architecture is not well understood or well communicated the project is unlikely to succeed.

Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond, 2nd Edition by Paul Clements and 8 other authors provides the most complete and current guidance, independent of language or notation, on how to capture an architecture in a commonly understandable form.

See this book review and interview with co-author Paulo Merson in the November 1 edition of InfoQ.

George Fairbanks of Rhino Research to Serve as SATURN 2012 Program Chair

I am pleased to announce that George Fairbanks of Rhino Research will serve as our SATURN 2012 program chair. SATURN 2012 will be held in St. Petersburg, Fl. May 7-11, 2012 in collaboration with IEEE Software magazine. We are accepting abstract submissions for presentations and tutorials between now and November 30.

George Fairbanks is the author of Just Enough Software Architecture. We are delighted to have George’s help in shaping a high-quality technical program for SATURN 2012.

- Bill Pollak, SEI