Why Attend SATURN 2012?

SATURN 2012 is only a few weeks away. If you an experienced or aspiring practitioner or technical consultant and have seen the technical program, list of courses and tutorials, and descriptions of the keynotes and plenary talks, chances are that you found something on the program that would be relevant to your interests and concerns.

But if you still haven’t registered to attend SATURN, you probably have good reasons for hesitating. You may be having difficulty convincing the people who approve your travel requests that the benefits you will derive from attending will outweigh the costs of travel, conference fees, and perhaps most importantly, time away from the office–time during which you will not generate any billable hours or be able to contribute to important projects.

Why, then, do we think that you should consider registering for SATURN despite your good reasons for hesitating?

Rapid Lifecycle Development in an Agile Context

This blog post at the SEI blog describes research on providing software and systems architects with a decision-making framework for reducing integration risk with Agile methods, thereby reducing the time and resources needed for related work.

The research explores the implications of decisions made over the course of the software and systems lifecycle. It examines when these decisions are made and the time when the implications surface to validate the following hypotheses:

1. The fundamental early decisions made during the pre-engineering and manufacturing development (pre-EMD) phase have an impact throughout the lifecycle.
2. The implications of the early decisions often surface in the final stages of the lifecycle, downstream from development.

Read the full post here.

Something for Everyone at SATURN 2012

Whether you are an aspiring software architect or an experienced practitioner, the SATURN 2012 Conference offers courses, presentations, tutorials, and talks tailored to your level of knowledge and experience.

Relative newcomers to architecture-centric engineering and development can take the introductory course in the SEI Software Architecture Curriculum, Software Architecture: Principles and Practices (SAPP) on Monday and Tuesday, May 7-8 at a discounted price. This popular course, offered each year at SATURN and taught this year by Rob Wojcik of the SEI, introduces participants to the essentials of software architecture. Also offered at SATURN this year is a half-day tutorial on Tuesday, May 8 by Peter Eeles of IBM Rational titled Software Architect 101. This tutorial (T1) provides attendees with a solid grounding in all aspects of software architecture and a framework on which they can build a deeper understanding of the role of the architect. Other Tuesday tutorials cover effective stakeholder collaboration (T2), integration of software architecture-centric methods into object-oriented analysis and design (T3), and architectural implications of cloud computing (T4).