Free Webinar: Architecting Software the SEI Way: Essential Stops Toward Mastery

Start down the path to using architecture-centric practice more effectively. Join SEI researchers on February 28 at 1:00 pm ET for a FREE webinar, Architecting Software the SEI Way: Essential Steps Toward Mastery.

Get an expert perspective on three key areas in this webinar:

• Fundamentals: Learn what software architecture is and why it is important
• Improved Practice: Get a quick look at architecture evaluation guidelines
• Bridging Technical and Business Goals: See how to use architecture methods to analyze and evaluate enterprise architectures

Register now.

Developing an Architecture-Focused Measurement Framework for Managing Technical Debt

Managing technical debt, which refers to the rework and degraded quality resulting from overly hasty delivery of software capabilities to users, is an increasingly critical aspect of producing cost-effective, timely, and high-quality software products. A delicate balance is needed between the desire to release new software capabilities rapidly to satisfy users and the desire to practice sound software engineering that reduces rework.  This blog post at the SEI blog by Ipek Ozkaya discusses how an architecture-focused analysis approach helps manage technical debt by enabling software engineers to decide the best time to rearchitect—in other words, to pay down the technical debt.

Rick Kazman on Evaluating Software Architectures

Evaluating software architectures is a critical part of software architecture life-cycle processes. The book Evaluating Software Architectures: Methods and Case Studies covers the software architecture evaluation topic in detail focusing on evaluation frameworks such as Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM), Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM), and Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs (ARID). The authors also discuss in the book some case studies in applying these frameworks as well as comparison of the software architecture evaluation methods.

InfoQ spoke with Rick Kazman, Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and a co-author of the book, about the significance of evaluating software architectures and how to perform the architecture evaluations in Agile and Lean software-development organizations. They also talked to him about the emerging trends.

Read InfoQ’s interview with Rick Kazman.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.