Fourth SEI Software Architecture Technology User Network Workshop
April 28 – May 1, 2008 | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Working Sessions

W1: Architecture-Based System Evolution
Facilitators: Rick Kazman, Mark Klein, & Robert Nord

W2: System and SoS Architecture Evaluation
Facilitators: Mike Gagliardi, John Klein, & Bill Wood

W3: Architect's Dilemma for the Bazaar
Facilitators: Scott Hissam & Rob Wojcik

 

W1: Architecture-Based System Evolution
Facilitators: Rick Kazman, Mark Klein, & Robert Nord

Many systems are built to be in service over a long period of time. However, planning for evolution over the entire life span of a system is daunting, since the future is fraught with uncertainty. Market, social, economic, political, and technological forces exert pressures for a system to change but these forces are hard to anticipate. These forces, and a system's reaction to them, influence a system's utility-or measure of usefulness relative to its business goals. Therefore, changes along any of these dimensions may affect the future utility of the system. For example, technologies that systems are built upon change, and new architectural design paradigms emerge... It is a challenge for organizations to confidently make principled decisions on how to prepare a system for evolution.

We believe that a system's architecture provides considerable leverage for reasoning about planning for system evolution.

During this working session, session leaders and participants will discuss and identify the benefits and challenges in embracing architecture-centric evolution as a software development life cycle approach. We will structure the working session around examples that the session leaders will present to the participants. These examples show how to leverage a system's architecture to consider system evolution as an investment activity where the goal is to maximize utility per unit cost over time. After reviewing the examples, the session leaders will guide a discussion around the following questions:

W2: System and SoS Architecture Evaluation
Facilitators: Mike Gagliardi, Bill Wood, and John Klein

Technologies like broadband data links, open APIs, and standards-based platforms make it easier than ever to construct a system-of-systems (SoS), however, we often see integration problems and operational failures. Some of these problems arise from the diversity of the functionalities being integrated, while others can be traced to the lack of focus on cross cutting quality attributes. The incremental construction strategies used in many SoS projects, where systems are integrated into the SoS over a period of months or years, further exacerbates these architecture problems, since the quality attribute weaknesses of the SoS may not be evident until late in the project. These problems occur in both the military and commercial domains, in applications ranging from command and control to service-oriented and enterprise architectures.

We are currently developing a two-pronged approach to address the early identification of quality attribute inconsistencies within system and SoS architectures. The first approach is to expand the scope of the existing ATAM into system architecture, making minor enhancements to the methodology as needed to address the issue at the system level. The second approach is top down at the SoS level and involves performing a "first pass" identification of inconsistencies across the constituent systems, using existing mission threads or workflows that are augmented with quality attribute concerns.

During this facilitated working session, we will focus on the second approach, presenting example applications of the technique using augmented mission threads to evaluate a command and control system and using augmented workflows to evaluate a customer service application. We will ask participants to share their comments and concerns, and encourage participants to share their own experiences and their thoughts about system and SoS architecture evaluation in general.

W3: Architect's Dilemma for the Bazaar
Facilitators: Scott Hissam & Rob Wojcik

Designing, deploying and maintaining software solutions using software components from the Open Source community can yield real benefits. In many ways, these benefits parallel those that can be achieved using proprietary, commercial off-the-shelf software. However, Open Source Software components, and the engineering practices that go into their development, can bring into play their own set of unique benefits as well as challenges that set them apart from their proprietary brethren.

During this working session, session leaders and participants will discuss and identify the benefits and challenges that are unique to Open Source components and discuss how to make the most of the benefits and deal with the challenges. Topics will include: