Workshop on Managing Technical Debt at ICSE 2011

Delivering increasingly complex software-reliant systems demands better ways to manage the long-term effects of short-term expedients. The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the software development community as a way to understand and communicate such issues. The power of the metaphor is that it communicates well the essence of the tradeoffs that are at the core of many software engineering decisions–balancing economic outcomes while continuing to meet business and user needs. The downside, however, is that the more the metaphor resonates the more there is need to understand the quantifiable and scientific principles to avoid confusion. In addition, today the metaphor is used not only to refer to suboptimal coding and refactoring practices as it was originally used by Ward Cunningham, but also to describe issues observed during different software development activities: requirements debt, testing debt, and architectural debt to name a few.

A Lesson Learned in Project Agility: Using Architecture-Centric Engineering on a TSP Project

We learned an important lesson recently about breaking down barriers between architects and developers when we were challenged to deliver the architecture in smaller increments and shorter iterations.

In winter 2009/2010 we had the opportunity to participate in a project with Bursatec, the IT arm of La Bolsa Mexicana de Valores (the Mexican Stock Exchange), to replace its main online stock trading engine with one that would also incorporate trading of other financial instruments such as options and futures. The project had aggressive goals for performance and delivery, and as the face of Mexico’s financial markets to the world, the new trading engine needed to function flawlessly.

Automation World: ABB product architecture supports usability

Designing automation products for better usability can produce obvious benefits for users.

But it can also lead to savings for automation vendors. One example can be seen in work done recently by Pia Stoll, an industrial software systems researcher at ABB Corporate Research, in Vasteras, Sweden, in conjunction with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in Pittsburgh.

Read more in this article at Automation World.

Architecture-Centric Guidance Incorporated into Latest Version of CMMI

Architecture modeling is an established practice for the realization of high-quality software. The latest release of CMMI Version 1.3 models includes a number of changes enhancing its effectiveness  by making architecting more explicit, such as a more prominent role for quality attributes and a more clearly defined concept of architecture.

Architecting guidance, previously implicit and now more explicit, is primarily addressed in the following process areas: