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March 5, 2012—The SEI announced a new course, Advanced Software Architecture Workshop, to debut at the SATURN 2012 Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, on May 7 and 8. Serving as the next step to mastering software architecture after the SEI Software Architecture: Principles and Practices course, this course allows participants to apply what they’ve learned through past SEI courses to a concrete architecture problem. This advanced course will integrate classroom knowledge with everyday practice, enabling participants to become comfortable with the SEI architecture-centric engineering methods and then use those methods effectively in their organizations.

Participants will enjoy in-depth coverage of the concepts needed to effectively improve existing architectures and a hands-on approach to revising architecture. Using an actual architecture as an example, participants will select a problematic scenario for the system, examine the possible weak points of the software architecture, decide on appropriate mitigations, review their proposed changes in groups, and revise the architecture as required. Time permitting, participants also prepare documentation for the development. Course content is based on the SEI books Software Architecture in Practice, 2nd Edition, and Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond, 2nd Edition.

The new course was originally developed as a workshop on the practical applications of software architecture for the U.S. Army and a training program for young professionals. These programs have been brought together to allow participants to apply previous architecture knowledge to solve a real-life problem. This two-day workshop guides the participants with four exercises through a typical architecture-improvement cycle in a concrete project setting. At the beginning, the participants are introduced to an architecture that has undergone evaluation through the SEI Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method® (ATAM)®. Participants then address any risks uncovered by the evaluation.

After attending, participants will be able to

• improve architecture through a defined process
• analyze and plan architecture tasks
• improve an existing architecture design
• conduct a scenario-based peer review
• prepare the architecture documentation to support conformance of the implementation

The course will be taught by Felix H. Bachmann of the SEI, who says, “The course will offer an applied, practical aspect, which will remove the fear or uncertainty, the learning curve that architects feel when beginning a project.” “Through group work, participants will also learn to communicate their solution with team members in an understandable way, based on facts and evidence,” Bachmann says.

The course is targeted towards

• software architects and software lead designers who want to practice what they learned in the SEI software architecture curriculum, and
• seasoned software architects who want to prepare for a project that requires major architecture improvements

Participants must have a minimum knowledge of software architecture, quality attributes, and documentation before enrolling, and will be asked to put existing knowledge to use in their project teams.

For more information regarding the course, visit http://www.sei.cmu.edu/saturn/2012/courses.cfm#workshop. For more information about architecture-centric engineering, see the SEI blog post authored by Felix Bachmann. To learn about and register for the SATURN 2012 Conference, visit http://www.sei.cmu.edu/saturn/2012/.