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.

SATURN 2011 Theme Leader to Present SEI Webinar: Emerging Technologies for Software-Reliant Systems

(The archived version of this webinar can now be viewed here.)

On Thursday, February 24 from 1:30 to 2:30 PM EST, Grace Lewis of the SEI will present a free SEI webinar, titled “Emerging Technologies for Software-Reliant Systems.”

Register.

Lewis is one of seven theme leaders for SATURN 2011, which will be held on May 16-20 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, California. She recently wrote a blog post about SOA and cloud computing, the theme that she is leading for SATURN 2011. This webinar and others are our way of introducing readers to the themes that will be covered at SATURN 2011. Registration for SATURN is now open.

About the Webinar

Software-reliant systems of systems (SoS) now tend to be highly distributed software systems, formed from constituent software systems that are operated and managed by different organizations.

SEI architecture research planned for 2011

Each year, the SEI conducts a program of research in architecture-centric engineering. These are the topics that we plan to investigate in 2011:

1. Quality Attribute Foundations and Analysis

• Resource allocation for massively parallel multicore platforms–developing task models, resource abstractions, and scheduling strategies for predicting real-time performance
• Static analysis for multicore—investigating use of scalable static analysis to ensure that concurrency-related invariants are preserved as systems move to multicore platforms.
• System reliability framework—developing new metrics and approaches for using architecture knowledge to assure the safe and reliable operation of software-reliant systems
• Architecture-based testing—investigating techniques for using architecture knowledge to inform and reduce system testing.

Link Roundup: September 1, 2010

Good morning,

Welcome to our August 31 link roundup. Here are some notable posts from other software engineering blogs that you may have recently missed:

Architectural Decisions: Accidental or On Purpose? by Christine Miyachi at The Abstract Software Architect. Christine talks about how she uses mind maps to keep track of architectural decisions.

The Emerging Future: Systems of Systems, an IBM webcast. Bruce Powel Douglass talks about issues and potential future solutions for systems of systems.

A Trace in the Sand, by Ruth Malan. Ruth was one of the turoial presenters at SATURN 2010, and her blog is full of great ideas on architecture.

Is Your Head in the Clouds? Or is it Elsewhere? by Harry J. Foxwell, PhD. Harry asks some important questions about if your organization is ready for cloud computing.

Meeting the Range of SOA Needs

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an increasingly popular mechanism for achieving interoperability among systems. To help organizations adopt SOA, the SEI developed SMART—the SOA Migration, Adoption, and Reuse Technique—in 2005. To learn more about how this technique has evolved through practical application, read this just-published article on the SEI website or listen to a podcast by the SEI’s Grace Lewis.

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 TECHdotMN Session Notes, SOA/Cloud Computing Parallel Sessions, Thursday, May 20

SATURN 2010 / TECHdotMN field notes
by Mike Bollinger 5/20/10

Cloud Computing Architecture by Dr. Gerald Kaefer

As a product manager working in sectors of health care and energy optimization inside Siemens, Gerald discusses the opportunities and challenges of increasing awareness internally for Cloud Computing – what’s changing and how to respond to that.

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service-provider interaction (Source: NIST Cloud Computing Project, http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/cloud-def-v14.doc).