The SEI Architecture Based Testing Project: Feedback Requested

A new project at the SEI

The SEI’s Architecture-Centric Engineering (ACE) Initiative has launched a new research project called “Architecture Based Testing.”  I thought I would use this opportunity to tell everyone about it, and to ask for your feedback.

By architecture-based testing, we mean using a system’s architecture to inform and guide the system’s testing activities. While there has been substantial work devoted to this topic in the research community, not much of that research seems to have filtered into communities of practitioners. Hence, the promise of architecture-based testing–to use architecture to reduce the time and expense of testing and to increase its effectiveness–remains unfulfilled.

Charting the territory

Work in architecture-based testing can be broadly categorized as follows:

CrossTalk: Enabling Agility Through Architecture

Industry and government stakeholders continue to demand increasingly rapid innovation and the ability to adjust products and systems to emerging needs. Amid all the enthusiasm for using Agile practices to meet these needs, the critical role of the underlying architecture is often overlooked.

Nanette Brown, Robert Nord, and Ipek Ozkaya explore the confluence of agility and architecture in an article in the December issue of CrossTalk. See Enabling Agility Through Architecture (PDF). The article presents insights from an independent research and development project conducted at the SEI on communicating the value of architecting within Agile development.

 

Submit Presentation Abstracts for SATURN 2011 by November 30

The deadline for submitting presentation abstracts for the SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) 2011 conference is quickly approaching. Abstracts for presentations and/or half-day tutorial sessions will be accepted until 11:59:59 p.m. EDT on November 30, 2010.

We are looking for individuals who have real-world examples, insights, innovative ideas, or an exciting perspective on software architecture to share with fellow software professionals.

The theme for the SATURN 2011 conference is Architecting the Future with a focus on architecture methods, techniques, and practices that will shape the future of architecture and enable architecture to shape our future. We’re calling this “7 Things You Need to Know about the Next 7 Years in Architecture.”

For more information on topics, format, terms and conditions, and submission details, visit the SATURN 2011 website at www.sei.cmu.edu/saturn/2011/call.cfm.

The SATURN 2011 Conference will be held at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, California May 16-20, 2011. SATURN is presented by the SEI in collaboration with IEEE Software magazine. Selected conference papers will be featured in a future issue of IEEE Software.

We look forward to receiving your submission, and we hope to see you in California!

Research on Mobile Computing in Tactical Environments with Handheld Devices

Ed Morris, a researcher at the SEI

Recently, Ed Morris and his colleagues at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) have investigated the feasibility of service-oriented computing on handheld mobile devices in constrained network environments.

“We know that service-oriented computing, in the SOA paradigm, provides a standardized interface for the exchange of information. So there is infrastructure in place to simplify platform-to-platform interoperability,” Morris says. “But can SOA work on a smartphone in a tactical network environment, where network bandwidth and availability are more limited? It’s not that we care necessarily about SOA, but the military for one needs some strategy that simplifies the connections for interoperability between sensors and mobile, handheld devices in those environments.”

SATURN 2011 Theme: Architectural Knowledge Management (Olaf Zimmermann)

Knowledge sharing is something that has been on my radar since I got into patterns and methods in the late 1990s. Many software architectures and technology innovations are grounded in knowledge accumulated over time–it is a lot easier to shape the future if we manage to avoid past mistakes and to translate proven designs into new application areas.

Now, what in particular is architectural knowledge management and why do we care? Architectural decisions play a key role here. Philippe Kruchten highlighted their importance in his SATURN 2010 keynote and tutorial:

Intuit Executive Jan Bosch to Keynote at SATURN 2011

Jan Bosch, Vice President of Open Innovation and head of the central mobile technologies group at Intuit, Inc., will deliver a keynote address at the seventh annual SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) Conference, which will be held May 16-20, 2011 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot in Burlingame, California.

Bosch has worked in the software engineering industry for more than two decades as engineer, professor, consultant, and executive. His research activities include software architecture design, software product families, software variability management, and component-oriented programming. He is the author of the book Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product Line Approach published by Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley & ACM Press). He has also co-edited several books and volumes in, among others, the Springer LNCS series and co-authored a significant number of research articles. For more information about Jan Bosch, visit his website at http://www.janbosch.com/Jan_Bosch/Jan_Bosch.html

Stay tuned to the SATURN website and SATURN blog for more information about Jan Bosch’s keynote address.

IEEE Software to Publish Articles by SATURN 2010 Presenters

Documenting experiences is an important aspect of creating enduring value from lessons learned. As a practitioner conference, SATURN has been focused on presentations and interactive learning without any paper proceedings. However, as our audience expanded and the discipline of software and system architecture matured, capturing some of the lessons discussed for posterity and later reference became a frequently repeated request.