Architects wanted for a survey

Wanted: software architects to participate in Carnegie Mellon survey.

We are designing a tool to help software architects evaluate their architecture designs for specific usability issues. We are looking for software architects to look at our design and take a brief online survey about your opinions of the design.

In user tests of a prototype of our tool, software architects at a major European development organization estimated they received a 17:1 ROI on time they spent using the tool to evaluate a design for a product line architecture.  An open-source version of the tool should become available for distribution in the near future.

Participation in the survey should take less than 30 minutes. Your responses will be kept confidential. To participate, please go to http://tinyurl.com/mfnvu6.

If you have any questions or would like further information, please contact egolden@cmu.edu. Thanks!

- Len Bass, SEI

Architecture Is Not Just for Architects

A tenet of our architecture-centric engineering (ACE) work at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is that architecture is not just for architects. Architects certainly are important stakeholders, but so are implementers, requirements engineers, product marketers, testers, and high-level managers. We believe that architecture plays an important role throughout the lifetime of a system and hence is important to many (if not all) of the stakeholders who have important roles throughout the lifetime of a system.

Agile Fun and Games

I have to admit that when I first started hearing about Extreme Programming and Agile methodologies, I was pretty skeptical.  Another software fad that will come and go, I thought. What first started to open up my mind was a conversation that I had with a young developer a number of years ago. I was interviewing him for a position and he was talking about Extreme Programming and I was thinking “Yeah. OK.” Then he said that without Extreme Programming he didn’t think he would still want to be doing development because Extreme Programming had made software development fun again. And that’s when I stopped and thought to myself, “Well, yeah, you know – it should be fun. It’s supposed to be fun.” And by fun, I don’t mean “drinking beer and playing foosball” fun (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Multicore Association News

SEI researchers are exploring concurrent-programming challenges as they apply to software engineering. They are investigating analytical methods for reasoning about the response time and processor utilization of multicore systems through efficient scheduling, allocation, and synchronization in embedded, real-time, multicore systems.

As members of the Multicore Association (MCA), members of the technical staff at the SEI participate in the MCA’s Multicore Programming Practices (MPP) working group. This working group has developed a multicore-software programming guide for industry.

For more on the activities of the MPP working group, see The multicore future, and how to survive it: avoiding the proprietary extensions trap in the August 25 edition of The Register.

- Bill Pollak, SEI

Observations from the Agile Alliance Conference – Part 2

At the Agile Alliance conference, Scott Ambler gave a thought-provoking talk entitled “Agile by the Numbers – What People are Really doing in Practice”.

Scott has been conducting surveys focused on the Agile Community for several years. He has made the survey data available at the following URL -  www.ambysoft.com/surveys. The published Agile surveys span the years from 2006 to 2009 and cover the following topics:

• Agile Adoption Rates
• Agile Practices
• Agile Project Initiation
• Agile Certification
• Test-driven Development

Observations from the Agile Alliance 2009 Conference – Part 1

In my last post, I started a discussion on the relationship between Agile practices and Architecture. Last month I attended the Agile Alliance conference in Chicago to learn more about where the Agile movement is headed and where Architecture fits in.

talk in NYC

I am giving a talk in NYC at the IASA regional conference there.  Do not be fooled by the picture on the web site. As of now, the picture over my name  is of Paul Clements who will not be attending. Come and see me instead.

Len Bass