SATURN 2011 Theme Leader to Present SEI Webinar on Architectural Knowledge Management

On Thursday, February 10 from 1:30 to 2:30 PM EDT, Olaf Zimmerman of IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland will present a free SEI Webinar, titled “Architectural Knowledge Management: Decision Guidance in Service-Oriented Architecture Design.”

Register.

Dr. Zimmerman is one of seven theme leaders for SATURN 2011, which will be held on May 16-20 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, California. Dr. Zimmerman wrote a blog post about architectural knowledge management here in November. This webinar and others that we hope will follow are our way of helping to introduce readers to the themes that will be covered at SATURN 2011. Registration for SATURN is now open.

Business Drivers and Patterns that Conflict with Service Orientation

If an organization’s business drivers and technical requirements do not include the integration of components or systems running on different platforms or implemented using different technologies, service orientation may be overkill. There is an overhead for SOA technologies to provide interoperability across platforms. If an organization runs a set of applications built on a homogenous development platform with few interactions with legacy systems running on different platforms and the situation is not likely to change, a move towards service orientation is hard to justify. Likewise, if an organization’s software solutions consist of co-located components or distributed components that interact via e-mail messages, file sharing, or proprietary messaging systems, sophisticated integration mechanisms provided by SOA are an unnecessary burden.

SATURN 2010 Conference Articles Published in Jan/Feb Issue of IEEE Software

In the January/February 2011 issue of IEEE Software, readers will find four articles that came out of the SATURN 2010 Conference program.

The technical articles include Tony Tsakiris’ report on experiences at Ford and Olaf Zimmermann’s results from work at IBM Zurich. Tsakiris and Zimmermann were both also recipients of the outstanding presentation awards that were given for the first time in a SATURN conference in 2010. The same issue includes an insights piece from Arthur Wright about his experiences of evolving existing systems to changing business needs at Credit Suisse. Also featured in the January/February issue is a technical article by Grace Lewis from the SEI discussing engineering lessons learned from service-oriented systems.

SEI Webinar January 19: CMMI v1.3 and Architecture-Centric Engineering

Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Time: 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM EDT
Cost: Free

Abstract

Architecture modeling is an established practice for the realization of high-quality software. A significant change to the CMMI V1.3 models is the new emphasis on the role of architecture in the design process. This webinar will address the basics of architecture-centric engineering, and where and how these practices are now reflected in the CMMI models.

Topics include

SEI architecture research planned for 2011

Each year, the SEI conducts a program of research in architecture-centric engineering. These are the topics that we plan to investigate in 2011:

1. Quality Attribute Foundations and Analysis

• Resource allocation for massively parallel multicore platforms–developing task models, resource abstractions, and scheduling strategies for predicting real-time performance
• Static analysis for multicore—investigating use of scalable static analysis to ensure that concurrency-related invariants are preserved as systems move to multicore platforms.
• System reliability framework—developing new metrics and approaches for using architecture knowledge to assure the safe and reliable operation of software-reliant systems
• Architecture-based testing—investigating techniques for using architecture knowledge to inform and reduce system testing.

SATURN 2011 Theme: Soft Skills of an Architect (Jeff Tyree)

It has been my experience that architects, as technical leaders, have three primary objectives within an organization. Namely, architects

1. Develop and implement solutions to the most challenging technical problems
2. Achieve organizational commitment to solve these technical problems in an enduring way, and
3. Teach and develop others to solve technical problems in a manner consistent with architectural principles.