Agile Architecting: Hot Topic at SATURN 2011

Over the past 10 years, Agile software development has become increasingly influential. Once applied predominantly to IT-based applications developed by small co-located teams, Agile practices are now being implemented on large multi-team projects, across distributed-development environments, and on embedded safety-critical products.

As Agile projects grow in scope, breadth, and size, however, challenges emerge as practitioners wrestle with the need to scale up Agile practices. Communication between distributed teams is one such challenge. Coordinating multiple backlogs or managing a single backlog that feeds multiple teams is another.

A Lesson Learned in Project Agility: Using Architecture-Centric Engineering on a TSP Project

We learned an important lesson recently about breaking down barriers between architects and developers when we were challenged to deliver the architecture in smaller increments and shorter iterations.

In winter 2009/2010 we had the opportunity to participate in a project with Bursatec, the IT arm of La Bolsa Mexicana de Valores (the Mexican Stock Exchange), to replace its main online stock trading engine with one that would also incorporate trading of other financial instruments such as options and futures. The project had aggressive goals for performance and delivery, and as the face of Mexico’s financial markets to the world, the new trading engine needed to function flawlessly.

SATURN 2010 Best Presentation Awards (reprinted from IEEE Software)

IEEE Software sponsored two outstanding presenter awards during the Sixth Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) Conference, in May 2010. The awards were created to honor presenters for their contributions to architecture-centric practices. The awards, the first ever at a SATURN conference, were conferred based directly on conference attendees’ votes.

Architects of Change at SATURN 2010

What a month it has been: busy, tiring, but full of energy and thought-provoking exchanges!

SATURN attendance has been growing steadily since its inception in 2005, and this year’s conference was no exception with attendees from 14 countries, representing more than 70 organizations. More importantly, the level of sincerity in sharing lessons learned through the presentations and the spirit of collaboration beyond the sessions that spilled into the evening activities was remarkable. Attendees were busy learning from each other and exchanging ideas until the minute their shuttles were ready to take them to the airport Friday afternoon (me included—I had to run out of the door.)

Here are my takeaways from this year’s conference, which is by no means an all-inclusive list, nor does it cover all the high quality presentations:

SATURN 2010 Attendees Discuss Jim Highsmith Keynote

We took a few minutes to chat with a few SATURN 2010 attendees about their personal reactions to what they heard during Jim Highsmith’s Keynote talk, “Architects: Anchors or Accelerators to Organizational Agility”.