SATURN 2013 Sustainability and Security Session (notes)

Notes by Frank M. Rischner

Architecting Long-Lived Systems
Harald Wesenberg and Einar Landre, Statoil
Arne Wiklund, Kongsberg

Statoil uses environmental-monitoring software for monitoring the impacts of their oil business on the environment. Statoil struggled to build a system that would live for a long time. Making sure there is no impact on the environment, how do we build a system that lives for 70 years and adapts to changes?

• Don’t monitor the major events like oils spills; monitor the little things and their impacts on the environment.
• Use agile projects, since there are a huge number of unknowns in the unknowns.
• Use stacking capabilities and business capabilities. Those business capabilities are driven by value, are measurable, and provide actions. Each capability is a small enterprise-architecture element.

SATURN 2013 Keynote Address: 15 Years of SOA at Credit Suisse: Lessons Learned and Remaining Challenges, Stephan Murer

Notes by Frank M. Rischner, Ian De Silva, and Brendan Foote

SATURN 2013 Keynote Address: 15 Years of SOA at Credit Suisse: Lessons Learned and Remaining Challenges

Stephan Murer, Credit Suisse

Murer works for Credit Suisse, which finds competitive advantage in creating their own systems, rather than outsourcing that work to software vendors. The company handles a large-scale user base, with almost 67,750 users in 550 locations. The data is managed and stored in four main data centers. Currently, Credit Suisse manages about 6,400 applications as well as about 70,000 email accounts. The volume of the applications developed in-house is about 200 million lines of code. The number of managed applications at Credit Suisse is of course lower than in any app store, but the focus is more on the integration of the applications. The largest scalability concern Murer sees coming is storage, for example, if regulators require them to start recording video conferences for compliance reasons.

SATURN 2013 Open Space: Participate!

SATURN 2013 covers many topics in a variety of areas relevant to software architecture and delivering quality systems; but there might be one topic that you are passionate about that is missing. Or SATURN coverage of a topic may not be as deep as you would like, and you may want to share and learn more. This year, SATURN will provide the opportunity for you to explore topics of your choice at the Open Space on Wednesday May 2, 4:15-5:15 PM.

SATURN 2013 Lightning Talks: Participate!

Got something to say about software architecture? Here is your chance! The program for SATURN 2013 includes a “Lightning Talks” session on Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at 4:15 pm. The session will be a rapid-fire series of five-minute talks on any topic related to software architecture. Do you have a story about a project success (or maybe a not-so-successful project)? A method or technique that you use? A tool that you have developed? An opinion about one of the hot technologies? A reaction to one of the earlier presentations or keynotes? This is your chance to brag, share, or just get something off your chest.

Record Attendance at SATURN 2013; Tutorials Available; Special Events Planned

The international software architecture community has responded to this year’s SATURN technical program by setting a new attendance record for the SEI Architecture Technology User Group (SATURN) Conference. SATURN, now in its 9th year, will be held at the Marriott City Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from April 29 to May 3, 2013, and registration is still open. Currently 181 people are registered to attend, breaking the previous SATURN attendance record of 166 attendees in 2011.

Architecting Service-Oriented Systems

In 2009, a popular blogger published a post entitled “SOA is Dead,” which generated extensive commentary among those who work in the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Many practitioners in this field completely misinterpreted the post; some read the title and just assumed that the content referenced the demise of SOA. Quite the opposite, the post was inviting people to stop thinking about SOA as a set of technologies and start embracing SOA as an approach for designing, developing, and managing distributed systems that goes beyond just the technology. Unfortunately, even though SOA is still alive and widely adopted, a belief still persists that SOA can be purchased off the shelf. This post at the SEI blog highlights recent research aimed at clarifying this misperception for architects, as well as identifying the elements that constitute a service-oriented system and the relationships between these elements.

SATURN 2013 Program Highlights from Conference Program Chairs

As program chairs for SATURN 2013, we would like to provide you an overview of the presentation program (note: information about keynotes by Stephan Murer, Scott Berkun, and Mary Poppendieck, the invited talk by Philippe Kruchten, and tutorial highlights is already available in other blog posts).

We received many high quality submissions covering the topics of front-end architecture, back-end architecture, methods and tools, and technical leadership. In total we got contributions from more than 40 companies and organizations across three continents.

On Wednesday morning you have the tough choice to decide between three great sessions. For example, Harald Wesenberg from Statoil speaks about architecting for the long term in Session 1. In Session 2, Chris Armstrong presents ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 in action, while Session 3 deals with agile practices at scale.

Learn and Practice Architectural Coaching at SATURN

In Felix Bachmann’s tutorial at SATURN 2013 on Monday, April 29 titled Architectural Coaching, you will learn the essentials of how to successfully coach an architecture team in designing a software system that fulfills what the stakeholders want within the given constraints, such as budget and time.

You will learn about the importance of a product vision, the architecting process, and the soft skills required to lead a successful team.

In group exercises, you will work with a team to produce the product vision, which gives the team direction and motivation.

Learn About Risk- and Cost-Driven Architecture (RCDA) at SATURN

In his tutorial on Tuesday, April 30 at SATURN 2013 titled Pragmatic Solution Architecting with Risk- and Cost-Driven Architecture (RCDA), Eltjo Poort, lead expert on solution architecture at CGI (formerly Logica), will present a solution-architecture approach tailored to today’s complex architecting environment. RCDA combines practices from enterprise and software architecture. Its risk-and-cost focus centers the approach on concrete drivers and helps teams to explain their architectural choices to managers and other business stakeholders in terms that they can understand.

RCDA practices were originally used within CGI to shape solutions for clients. The approach is based on well-vetted research work in Poort’s PhD thesis titled “Improving Solution Architecture Practices,” and has been successful within CGI, where 78% of lead architects trained in RCDA report that the training has made them more effective at their jobs.

Pragmatic Solution Architecting with Risk- and Cost-Driven Architecture (RCDA) has not been offered frequently in the U.S., so we encourage SATURN attendees to consider registering at the SATURN 2013 software architecture conference registration page. For more information, see Eltjo Poort’s blog.

 

Workshop on Managing Technical Debt at ICSE 2013

Fourth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt at ICSE 2013
San Francisco, California, May 20, 2013
Invited Speaker: Steve McConnell

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/community/td2013/

On May 20, 2013, we will be conducting a workshop in conjunction with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013) in San Francisco to scrutinize the diverse issues that are related to technical debt and the software development lifecycle.

Managing technical debt is a broad concern of software engineering that blends research and practice. This can be seen from the program that covers topics such as models for measuring and optimizing technical debt, economic models, tool support, managing dependencies, empirical studies, and use of the metaphor and related techniques in practice. To encourage interactive discussion, brainstorming, and community building the workshop will consist of short presentations from the accepted papers. These short presentations will provide a basis for the participants to investigate further open research questions and challenges in practice. It is for that purpose that the program includes sessions dedicated to open discussion.

We invite members of the software engineering community to join us. The details of the program and other logistics are at our workshop site.

– Robert Nord, SEI