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.

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

Reflections on 20 Years of Software Architecture: A Presentation by Robert Schwanke

Here is the third 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 of X.commerce/eBay.

Read the third in the series, Reflections on 20 Years of Software Architecture: A Presentation by Robert Schwanke, who reflected on four general problems in software architecture: modularity, systems of systems, maintainable architecture descriptions, and system architecture.

SEI Blog: Reflections on 20 Years of Architecture: A Presentation by Douglas C. Schmidt

Here is the second 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 of X.commerce/eBay.

Read the second in the series, Reflections on 20 Years of Software Architecture: A Presentation by Douglas C. Schmidt, who discussed advances in software architecture practice for distributed real-time embedded systems during the past two decades.

SEI Contributes to a National Supercomputing Initiative

For more than 10 years, scientists, researchers, and engineers used the TeraGrid supercomputer network funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct advanced computational science. The SEI has joined a partnership of 17 organizations and helped develop the successor to the TeraGrid called the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). This post at the SEI blog, which is the first in a multi-part series, describes SEI work on XSEDE that allows researchers open access—directly from their desktops—to the suite of advanced computational tools and digital resources and services provided via XSEDE. This series is not so much concerned with supercomputers and supercomputing middleware, but rather with the nature of software engineering practice at the scale of the socio-technical ecosystem.

SEI Contributes to a National Supercomputing Initiative, at SEI blog.

SATURN 2013, Minneapolis MN April 29-May 3: Call for Submissions

In 2013, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) software architecture onference will celebrate its 9th year. Each year SATURN attracts an international audience of practicing software architects, industry thought leaders, developers, technical managers, and researchers to share ideas, insights, and experience about effective architecture-centric practices for developing and maintaining software-intensive systems.

Webinar, Architecting Software the SEI Way: Now Available on Demand

More than 630 people from 68 countries joined the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) three-hour, live virtual event entitled Architecting Software the SEI Way: Essential Steps Toward Mastery on February 28, 2012. The three hour-long webinars from the event are now available for on-demand viewing at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/go/architecting-software-the-sei-way/.

In the three webinars, SEI researchers Rob Wojcik, Felix Bachmann, and John Klein share insights from their work, including

• what software architecture is and why it is important
• why architecture evaluation methods can continuously ensure the creation of successful systems
• how a system-of-systems perspective improves the analysis of enterprise architectures

To watch the webinar recordings, download the webinar slides, and get more information about software architecture, please visit http://www.sei.cmu.edu/go/architecting-software-the-sei-way/.

Cloud Computing for the Battlefield

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is increasingly interested in having soldiers carry handheld mobile computing devices to support their mission needs. Soldiers can use handheld devices to help with various tasks, such as speech and image recognition, natural-language processing, decision making, and mission planning. Three challenges, however, present obstacles to achieving these capabilities.

1. Mobile devices offer less computational power than a conventional desktop or server computer.
2. Computation-intensive tasks, such as image recognition or use of a global positioning system (GPS), take a heavy toll on battery power.
3. Networks and bandwidth are unreliable.

This post at the SEI Blog by Grace Lewis explores SEI research in overcoming these challenges by using cloudlets. Cloudlets are localized, lightweight servers running one or more virtual machines (VMs) on which soldiers can offload expensive computations from their handheld mobile devices, thereby providing greater processing capacity and helping conserve battery power.

Free SEI Webinar 6/23: Service-Oriented Architecture: A Quality Attribute Perspective

On Thursday, June 23 from 1:30 to 2:30 Eastern time, Grace Lewis of the SEI will present a free SEI webinar, titled “Service-Oriented Architecture: A Quality Attribute Perspective.”

Register.

About the Webinar

Service orientation is an approach to software systems development that has become a popular way to implement distributed, loosely coupled systems, because it offers such features as standardization, platform independence, well-defined interfaces, and tool support that enables legacy-system integration. From a quality attribute point of view, the primary drivers for service-orientation adoption are interoperability and modifiability. However, a common misconception is that an architecture that uses a service-oriented approach can achieve these qualities by simply putting together a set of vendor products that provide an infrastructure and then using this infrastructure to expose a set of reusable services to build systems. In reality, there are many architectural decisions that need to be made. An architectural decision that promotes interoperability or modifiability can negatively impact other qualities, such as availability, reliability, security, and performance. This presentation will talk about  the effect that service orientation has on system quality attributes.

A New Approach for Handheld Devices in Tactical Networks

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is increasingly interested in having soldiers carry handheld computing devices to support their mission needs in tactical networks. Not surprisingly, however, conventional handheld computing devices (such as iPhone or Android smartphones) for commercial networks differ in significant ways from handheld devices for tactical networks. For example, conventional devices and the software that runs on them do not provide the capabilities and security needed by military devices, nor are they configured to work over DoD tactical networks with severe bandwidth limitations and stringent transmission security requirements.

This post at the new SEI blog describes exploratory research that the SEI is conducting to (1) create software that allows soldiers to access information on a handheld device and (2) program the software to tailor the information for a given mission or situation.