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.

SATURN 2011: John Favaro, IEEE Plenary Talk, Managing Architecture for Value

Managing Architecture for Value
John Favaro, Associate Editor in Chief, IEEE Software 

Abstract and presentation materials

These are notes from John Favaro’s IEEE Software plenary talk on May 19, 2011 at SATURN 2011.

Elephant in the room metaphor—deliberately ignoring an impending issue. Everyone knows it’s there, no one talks about it.

One such elephant is business value. Mentioned everywhere, not clearly defined or is pushed onto others to resolve.

What are those business goals?

A truism in the software development business is that systems exist to support business goals. Any system design decisions  that does not support business goals should not be made, and system design decisions that do support the business goals should be prioritized based on the particular goals.

The assumptions made in the above statement are that the business goals for a system are explicit and agreed upon by all stakeholders. Unfortunately, these assumptions are rarely true. More frequently, different stakeholders have different business goals for a particular system (often conflicting), some business goals are implicit and unstated, and still other business goals are not realizable.

Observations from the WICSA/ECSA 2009 Conference

Last month I attended the Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture and European Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA/ECSA 2009).

This was the eighth WICSA offering in a series of conferences beginning in 1999.  

Zachman Framework for Software Architecture?

Just heard the very interesting keynote from Zachman at the conference, and there is one thought I cannot get out of my mind.

The Zachman framework is about architecting the enterprise in terms of What?, How?, Where?, Who?, When?, and Why? from several different perspectives, such as the owners, architects, engineers, etc.

I see several similarities that software architecture tries to answer, therefore would it make sense to use the Zachman framework for software only products? I could see for example to structure the architecture documentation in this way. It might help to easily extract the information needed for the different stakeholders, such as the management, the developers, etc.

Any one with experience in this topic? Any thoughts?

- Felix Bachmann, SEI

Welcome to the SATURN Network Blog!

As we kick-off the fifth annual SATURN conference, we’re also excited to announce a new effort to engage architecture experts and practitioners: the SATURN Network Blog.