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

Mary Poppendieck, Expert on Lean Software Development, Will Keynote SATURN 2013

Mary Poppendieck, award-winning author and expert on Lean software development, will deliver a keynote address at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute’s annual software architecture conference. The SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) 2013 Conference, which will be held April 29 through May 3, 2013, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, will feature three keynote addresses by leaders in the field of software architecture.

Here is a press release announcing Mary Poppendieck’s keynote address at SATURN.

 

Call for Papers, Fourth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt at ICSE 2013

Fourth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt at ICSE 2013
San Francisco, California, May 20, 2013
Submission deadline: February 7, 2013
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/community/td2013/

On May 20, 2013, we will be organizing 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. We invite practitioners and researchers to join us in discussing early findings, future directions, experiences, and results. We are seeking papers on practical experience with technical debt, and approaches to evaluate and manage technical debt. The details of the call for papers and other logistics are at our workshop site.

IEEE Software Special Issue on Technical Debt

We have written a number of posts on managing technical debt, part of the SEI’s ongoing research agenda on providing a software architecture perspective to managing agility at scale.

In our most recent post, Ipek Ozkaya discusses how an architecture-focused analysis approach helps manage technical debt by enabling software engineers to decide the best time to rearchitect—in other words, to pay down the technical debt.

Developing an Architecture-Focused Measurement Framework for Managing Technical Debt

Managing technical debt, which refers to the rework and degraded quality resulting from overly hasty delivery of software capabilities to users, is an increasingly critical aspect of producing cost-effective, timely, and high-quality software products. A delicate balance is needed between the desire to release new software capabilities rapidly to satisfy users and the desire to practice sound software engineering that reduces rework.  This blog post at the SEI blog by Ipek Ozkaya discusses how an architecture-focused analysis approach helps manage technical debt by enabling software engineers to decide the best time to rearchitect—in other words, to pay down the technical debt.

SATURN 2011 Keynote: Jan Bosch, Architecture in the Age of Compositionality

Abstract and presentation materials

1. SPEED

Increasing speed trumps any other improvements R&D can provide to the company. As a process, methods, or tools professional, there is only one measure that justifies your existence: how have you helped teams move faster?

There is exponential growth between the introduction of a technology and the full economic exploitation of that technology. No efficiency improvement will outperform cycle-time reduction. So don’t optimize efficiency, optimize speed. “If you’re a fast race car, everything is efficient.”

“If you are not moving at the speed of the marketplace, you’re already dead–you just haven’t stopped breathing yet.” – Jack Welch

CrossTalk: Enabling Agility Through Architecture

Industry and government stakeholders continue to demand increasingly rapid innovation and the ability to adjust products and systems to emerging needs. Amid all the enthusiasm for using Agile practices to meet these needs, the critical role of the underlying architecture is often overlooked.

Nanette Brown, Robert Nord, and Ipek Ozkaya explore the confluence of agility and architecture in an article in the December issue of CrossTalk. See Enabling Agility Through Architecture (PDF). The article presents insights from an independent research and development project conducted at the SEI on communicating the value of architecting within Agile development.

 

From the Trenches: Technical Debt as Backpack?

Technical debt is a metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham as a means of explaining the need for refactoring to non-technical product stakeholders.

In short, the metaphor asserts that releasing a system with suboptimal architecture, design, and/or code burdens the development organization with debt. The interest payments associated with the debt cause future system enhancements to require increased time and effort. If refactoring techniques are not used to pay down the debt, debt can continue to accumulate to the point where enhancement activities grind to a halt, resulting in metaphorical (and potentially literal) bankruptcy.

SATURN 2010: IEEE Software Speaker Philippe Kruchten, Architecture and Agile: An Oymoron?

Agility: ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment (Jim Highsmith).

We define agility not by what we do, but by what we want to achieve.

Because software development is a knowledge activity, it deals with things that machines don’t deal with–uncertainty, unknowns, fear, distrust.