Stal and Hunt to Keynote the SATURN 2012 Conference

Michael Stal and Andy Hunt, two leading thinkers in the fields of software architecture and software engineering, will deliver keynote presentations at the SATURN 2012 conference. SATURN is the Software Engineering Institute’s annual conference devoted to software and systems architecture. SATURN 2012 will be held May 7-11, 2012 at the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Michael Stal is principal engineer at Siemens Corporate Research and Technologies. His main research topics address software architecture for distributed and/or embedded systems. He coaches projects within the various business units at Siemens and is in charge of educating the Siemens senior software architects. Stal earned a PhD from the University of Groningen where he has been appointed professor for software engineering. In addition, Stal co-authored the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture (POSA) book series.

Andy Hunt is a programmer turned consultant, author, and publisher. Hunt was one of the 17 founders of the Agile Alliance and also one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. He co-founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf, publishing award-winning and critically-acclaimed books for software developers. He also has authored award-winning and best-selling books, including The Pragmatic Programmer, co-written by Dave Thomas, and six other books, including the his latest, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.

In line with the SATURN 2012 conference theme “Architecture: Catalyst for Collaboration,” both keynote speakers will explore how practitioners can collaborate effectively across geographical, cultural, and technical boundaries to solve system problems.

See the SATURN 2012 website in January 2012 for more details about the keynote addresses as well as the preliminary conference program.

Workshop on Managing Technical Debt at ICSE 2012

On June 5, 2012 we will be organizing a workshop co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2012) in Zurich to scrutinize the diverse issues that are related to technical debt and the software development lifecycle. The details of the call for papers and other logistics are at our workshop site. We invite practitioners and researchers to join us in discussing early findings, future directions, experiences, and results.

An initial workshop was held at the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh on June 2–4, 2010. The outcomes of this workshop and open research questions are outlined in the position paper Managing Technical Debt in Software-Reliant Systems presented at the FSE/SDP 2010 Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering Research. The second workshop was held collocated with ICSE 2011. A summary of the workshop is available in the September 2011 issue of ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes.

The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the software development community, as a way to understand and communicate issues of intrinsic quality, value, and cost. The idea is that developers sometimes accept compromises in a system in one dimension (such as modularity) to meet an urgent demand in some other dimension (such as a deadline), and that such compromises incur a debt on which interest has to be paid and which should be repaid at some point for the long-term health of the project.

Record Number of Abstract Submissions for SATURN 2012

The SATURN technical committee and I are delighted by the number of people who showed interest in presenting at SATURN 2012 by submitting abstracts in response to our call for submissions. We had our highest number of abstracts ever this year, 92!, far exceeding our previous high of 73 submissions last year. Clearly there is growing interest in software architecture and in the SATURN Conference. The topic of this year’s conference–Architecture: Catalyst for Collaboration–spurred authors to submit on a wide variety of topics, including traditional uses of architecture (such as in coordinating large, distributed, or challenging projects), as well as more recent developments such as using architecture in Agile design evolution, outsourcing, and coordinating multiple Agile projects.

In the next several weeks, the program committee will be reviewing these proposals and crafting a high-quality technical program for SATURN 2012. We plan to notify presenters sometime during the first week in January about the status of their submissions. With such a large number of submissions, the conference must be more selective, and the acceptance percentage will be lower this year than in past years. My quick scan of the abstracts tells me that we will have some difficult decisions to make.

Thank you for your interest and engagement with SATURN 2012. We look forward to seeing you in St. Petersburg, Fl. May 7-11.

George Fairbanks
Technical Program Chair, SATURN 2012