Great Feedback from SATURN 2013 Attendees

Read this great review of SATURN 2013 on DZone from Simon Brown and listen to this podcast reviewing key SATURN 2013 takeaways by Bett Correa and Russ Miller.

SATURN 2013 Awards Conferred

Since 2010, the SEI and IEEE have been conferring two attendee-selected awards at SATURN. The IEEE Software SATURN Architecture in Practice Presentation Award is given to the presentation that best describes experiences, methods, and lessons learned from the implementation of architecture-centric practices. Anthony Tsakiris of Ford Motor Company, Jeromy Carriere of eBay, Inc., and Michael Keeling of Vivisimo received this award in 2010, 2011, and 2012 respectively. This year’s award winner was Simon Brown of Coding the Architecture for his presentation titled The Conflict Between Agile and Architecture: Myth or Reality.

SATURN 2013 IEEE Invited Talk: Games Software Architects Play, Philippe Kruchten

Notes by Brendan Foote and Ian De Silva

IEEE Invited Talk: Games Software Architect Play: On Reasoning Fallacies, Cognitive Biases, and Politics
Phillippe Kruchten, University of British Columbia

Phillippe got exposure to large and not-so-large companies as a software architecture consultant with Rational in the early part of the century. Everywhere, he saw how design really was the same thing as making decisions, and everyone uses a process to do that.

Get Involved in SEI Research

The SEI is conducting a survey to understand more about the extent to which architectural concerns play a role in agile software development. In particular, the goal of this survey is to understand some of the existing practices used to quantify architecture. This topic is of growing importance. As successful agile techniques are applied to larger and larger projects, they require increased visibility into the architecture of the system. Your participation is important to allow the SEI to correctly characterize the nature of the problem and to understand some solutions that people have found useful.

SATURN 2013 Agile II Session (notes)

Notes by Ian De Silva

The Conflict Between Agile and Architecture: Myth or Reality?
Simon Brown, Coding the Architecture

Agile is about working in small increments, getting feedback, and improving the process or product. Architecture is about structure and vision. There is no conflict between agile and architecture because every software project has an architecture. There is, however, a conflict in the approach and team structure.

SATURN 2013 Agile I Session (notes)

Notes by Ian De Silva

Introducing Agile in Large-Scale Projects
Vladimir Koncar, Ericsson Nikola Tesla
Drago Holub, Ericsson Nikola Tesla
Zoran Kokolj, Ericsson Nikola Tesla
Emina Filipovic-Juric, Ericsson Nikola Tesla
Josko Bilic, Ericsson Nikola Tesla

In this talk, Koncar described his team’s experiences using agile on a large-scale telecom project at Ericsson. This hardware-dependent project was estimated to be about 10 million lines of code, requiring the work of 100 developers for two years. Because of hardware-plan instability, uncertain requirements, and sensitive time to market, agile was the development methodology of choice. In particular, they used Scrum with long-term, cross-functional teams.

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 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

SATURN 2013 Tutorial Highlights

As the tutorial chair for SATURN 2013, I would like to share with you some of the exciting highlights from our tutorial program this year. You will want to make plans to stay all week. We start off the week with a series of very strong tutorials wrapping up the week Friday with tutorials from two of our featured conference speakers, Mary Poppendieck and Phillipe Kruchten.

Our selection of 10 tutorials covers the spectrum of conference topics including software design, backend integration/application hosting, methods and tools, and technical leadership. The tutorial program starts on Monday afternoon with an introduction to principles and patterns of RESTful web services (T1) and a practical guide to techniques and behaviors that will help you to successfully coach an architecture team (T2). Tuesday begins with an overview of a risk- and cost-driven architecture approach (T3) and a pattern-driven approach to architecture recovery and discovery (T4). Tuesday afternoon we continue with a tutorial on the key concepts of NoSQL databases from an architect’s perspective (T5) and a simple approach for developing software architecture diagrams (sketches) given by Simon Brown (T6).