Architects of Change at SATURN 2010

What a month it has been: busy, tiring, but full of energy and thought-provoking exchanges!

SATURN attendance has been growing steadily since its inception in 2005, and this year’s conference was no exception with attendees from 14 countries, representing more than 70 organizations. More importantly, the level of sincerity in sharing lessons learned through the presentations and the spirit of collaboration beyond the sessions that spilled into the evening activities was remarkable. Attendees were busy learning from each other and exchanging ideas until the minute their shuttles were ready to take them to the airport Friday afternoon (me included—I had to run out of the door.)

Here are my takeaways from this year’s conference, which is by no means an all-inclusive list, nor does it cover all the high quality presentations:

From the Trenches: Technical Debt as Backpack?

Technical debt is a metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham as a means of explaining the need for refactoring to non-technical product stakeholders.

In short, the metaphor asserts that releasing a system with suboptimal architecture, design, and/or code burdens the development organization with debt. The interest payments associated with the debt cause future system enhancements to require increased time and effort. If refactoring techniques are not used to pay down the debt, debt can continue to accumulate to the point where enhancement activities grind to a halt, resulting in metaphorical (and potentially literal) bankruptcy.

SATURN Presenters Honored at First-Ever IEEE Software SATURN Awards

As the second SATURN 2010 Conference day came to a close, we gathered to recognize two outstanding presenters during the first-ever IEEE Software SATURN Awards.

The IEEE Software SATURN Awards were created to honor the best and brightest presenters for their contributions to architecture-centric practices. Recipients of the awards were selected by attendees vote during the SATURN 2010 Conference. The honorees include

Anthony Tsakiris, Ford Motor Company
Managing Software Interfaces of On-Board Automotive Controllers
IEEE Software SATURN 2010 Architecture in Practice Presentation Award
Awarded to the presentation that best describes “lessons learned” in applying architecture-centric practices. The lessons and ideas described can be applied by others and help them to improve their use of architecture-centric practices.

Olaf Zimmermann, IBM Research GmbH
An Architectural Decision Modeling Framework for SOA and Cloud Design
IEEE Software SATURN 2010 New Directions Presentation Award
Awarded to the presentation that best describes ideas on the horizon where architecture-centric practices can assist innovation and change in today’s practices to deliver better systems faster.

Please congratulate these outstanding SATURN 2010 presenters as you see them.

SATURN 2010 TECHdotMN Session Notes, Linda Rising IEEE Software Speaker, Thursday, May 20

SATURN 2010 / TECHdotMN field notes
by Mike Bollinger 5/20/10

IEEE Software Speaker: Linda Rising

Linda Rising is a well-known presenter on patterns, agile development, and the change process. In her presentation to the SATURN 2010 conference, she discussed the software architect as a change agent. She argued that architects are like any other person in that they struggle to influence their own peers (in their own teams/organizations) to make good decisions and adopt good ideas. From her perspective, many people develop great solutions but struggle with execution (in other words, they struggle to make those ideas “happen”). In her presentation, Linda outlined some approaches to influence change by sharing stories of successful change agents and influencers, as well as supporting research in social psychology, which are included in the book Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising.

SATURN 2010, IEEE Software Speaker: Linda Rising, Architect as Change Agent

Grady Booch, architecture as hallucination: “Architecture is a collective hunch, a shared hallucination, an assertion by a set of stakeholders on the nature of their observable world, be it a world that is or a world as they wish it to be.”

The problem comes in when my delusion is different from yours. We get off track.

SATURN 2010 TECHdotMN Session Notes, SOA/Cloud Computing Parallel Sessions, Thursday, May 20

SATURN 2010 / TECHdotMN field notes
by Mike Bollinger 5/20/10

Cloud Computing Architecture by Dr. Gerald Kaefer

As a product manager working in sectors of health care and energy optimization inside Siemens, Gerald discusses the opportunities and challenges of increasing awareness internally for Cloud Computing – what’s changing and how to respond to that.

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service-provider interaction (Source: NIST Cloud Computing Project, http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/cloud-def-v14.doc).

SATURN 2010 TECHdotMN Session Notes, Wayne Longcore Keynote, Thursday, May 20

SATURN 2010 / TECHdotMN field notes
by Mike Bollinger 5/20/10

Keynote Address: Wayne Longcore

Wayne Longcore discusses the agile architecture methodology that his team used to create the “smart grid,” a high-functioning ultra-large-scale system. His talk was titled “Managing Scale and Agility: Transformational Architecture for the Smart Grid.”

SATURN 2010: Panel on Certification

Panelists:

• Rolf Siegers, Raytheon
• Don O’Connell, Boeing
• Frances Paulisch, Siemens AG
• Andy Ruth, International Association of Software Architects (IASA)
• Linda Northrop, SEI

Moderated by Paul Clements.

Each speaker gave brief overview of their organizations’ certification programs. Then each speaker presented concuding thoughts about certification programs for architects. Discussion and questions were welcomed throughout.

Here are excerpts and highlights:

Raytheon: Targeted for senior systems or enterprise architect practitioners. Companywide initiative that identifies, instructs, and assesses Raytheon’s top systems and enterprise architects. Intended to establish cadre of senior architects to develop architectures that meet Raytheon needs and mentor next generation of architects. Started in 2004. 150+ fully certified, 115+ others fully trained. Rest are at various stages. Certification is a mechanism to curtail “business-card architects.”

SATURN 2010: Notes from Wayne Longcore’s Keynote

Wayne Longcore, Managing Scale and Agility: Transformational Architecture for the Smart Grid

North American power grid is an ultra-large-scale (ULS) system. Cisco has said that it believes the Smart Grid will be 1000 times larger than today’s internet. When the electric grid went down in 2003, society was disrupted. The power grid must be adaptable. One of the defining characteristics of ULS systems is that, while pieces of the system might fail at times, the system as a whole must remain operational.

“I didn’t know the SEI term ULS system then, but I’d have used it had I known it.”

SATURN 2010 Attendees Discuss Jim Highsmith Keynote

We took a few minutes to chat with a few SATURN 2010 attendees about their personal reactions to what they heard during Jim Highsmith’s Keynote talk, “Architects: Anchors or Accelerators to Organizational Agility”.