SATURN 2013 Governance and Education Session (notes)

Notes by Ian De Silva

Software Development Improvement Program: Enabling Software Excellence at a Hardware Company
Sascha Stoeter, ABB

ABB has historically been a hardware company, but it has been slowly increasing the amount of software development it does since the 80s. It is a distributed company (in 34+ countries) with software embedded into products such as controllers. Each team has its own set of tools to support development efforts.

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.

SATURN 2013 Super-Early-Bird Registration Expires March 10

If you are a practicing or aspiring software architect, the SEI Software Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) 2013 Conference offers courses, presentations, tutorials, and talks providing technical advice and knowledge around four architectural themes:

• Front-end architectures: impact of living on the edge
• Back-end architectures and application hosting: go to the cloud or stay on the ground?
• Methods and tools: go with the flow or go your own way?
• Technical leadership: hard skills and soft skills

SATURN 2013 will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 29 through May 3, 2013. Register for the SATURN software architecture conference before March 10 at  to save $300 off the regular registration fee.

SATURN will feature thought-provoking and inspiring keynote and invited talks from leaders in the fields of software architecture and software development:

• Stephan Murer, Credit Suisse: 15 Years of SOA at Credit Suisse: Lessons Learned and Remaining Challenges
• Scott Berkun, author and frequent contributor at publications including Harvard Business Review and Business Week: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
• Mary Poppendieck, author and expert on Lean development: Learning to Surf
• Philippe Kruchten, leader and innovator in the field of software architecture for 35 years: Games Architects Play: On Reasoning Fallacies, Cognitive Biases, and Politics

Reflections on 20 Years of Software Architecture: Presentations by Jeromy Carriere and Ian Gorton

Here is the fourth and final installment in our series of blog posts at the SEI blog that provides lightly edited transcripts of remarks by SATURN 2012 panelists on the theme of “Reflections on 20 Years of Software Architecture.” The session was moderated by Rick Kazman of the SEI, and panelists were Linda Northrop of the SEI, Doug Schmidt of Vanderbilt University, Ian Gorton of Pacific Northwest National Lab, Robert Schwanke of Siemens Corporate Research, and Jeromy Carriere.

Read the post, Reflections in Software Architecture: Presentations by Jeromy Carriere & Ian Gorton.

Call for Papers: 5th International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service-Oriented Systems

Important Dates

Paper Submission: February 7, 2013
Acceptance Notification: February 28, 2013
Camera-Ready Copy: March 7, 2013

Background

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and service-oriented systems, which are built using the SOA paradigm, are now in the stage of widespread adoption, at least according to Gartner’s Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies. Due to the fact that some of the standards for service integration have stabilized, and driven by IT cost savings, organizations are starting to incorporate external software services into their systems, some of which are hosted in the cloud. From a provider perspective, many commercial companies such as Oracle, SAP, Intuit, and Netflix either have cloud-based offerings of their products or run their business completely in the cloud.

The special theme of the 5th edition of the PESOS workshop is “Service Engineering for the Cloud.” Cloud Computing is shaping the way that organizations acquire and use systems — software-as-a-service (SaaS) model — and how they develop and deploy systems — platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) models. Even though cloud platforms and infrastructures are typically designed to scale on demand, the question is whether this automatic elasticity translates to all services deployed on them.

SEI Virtual Event: Architecting in a Complex World

Don’t let complexity defeat your system development effort. This SEI virtual event takes you in depth into three keys to succeed with system development in the midst of complexity.

Date: January 16, 2013
Time: 1:00 – 4:00 PM ET
Cost: Complimentary

Register now.

About the Event

Mahadev Satyanarayanan from Carnegie Mellon to Keynote CompArch 2013 Conference

Mahadev Satyanarayanan, professor of computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, will give a keynote at the upcoming federated CompArch 2013 conference to be held June 17–21, 2013 in Vancouver BC, Canada on the campus of the University of British Columbia.

In line with the theme “The System View” of the federated conference on the Quality of Software Architectures (QoSA 2013), Satya will discuss the impact of mobility on system architecture. He will talk about the core challenges of mobile computing, and show how these challenges have dominated the evolution of system architectures. Looking ahead, he will make the case for an intermediate architectural tier arising from the convergence of mobile and cloud computing.

Ultimate Architecture Enforcement: Prevent Code Violations at Code-Commit Time

Author: Paulo Merson

If you’re a more pragmatic than avid reader, feel free to jump to the solution section of this post to read about my experience using Checkstyle and pre-commit hooks on Subversion to verify the conformance between code and architecture, and more.

Foremost, source code must address the functional requirements and should not have bugs. We usually verify these qualities through testing–absolutely important, but not the subject of this post. Quality source code also involves simple things such as following code conventions and programming best practices, as well as more sophisticated requirements such as modularity, low coupling, and extensibility. The latter characteristics are often achieved through a carefully crafted software architecture.

Still Available to View: “Use of Architecture-Centric Engineering for Improving a Software System”

On Thursday, October 17 from 1:30 to 2:30 Eastern time, Felix H. Bachmann of the SEI presented a free SEI webinar, titled “Use of Architecture-Centric Engineering for Improving a Software System.”

This well-received and informative webinar is still available for viewing here.

SEI Blog: Reflections on 20 Years of Software Architecture (Linda Northrop)

One of the most compelling and engaging events at SATURN 2012 was a panel discussion on the theme of “Reflections on 20 Years of Software Architecture.” The session was moderated by Rick Kazman of the SEI, and panelists were Linda Northrop of the SEI, Doug Schmidt of Vanderbilt University, Ian Gorton of Pacific Northwest National Lab, Robert Schwanke of Siemens Corporate Research, and Jeromy Carriere of X.commerce/eBay.

Today we began a series of blog posts at the SEI blog that will provide lightly edited transcripts of the remarks of our distinguished panelists.

Read the first in the series, Reflections on 20 Years of Software Architecture: A Presentation by Linda Northrop.