Thanks for a Great SATURN 2009 Conference...

Thank you to all SATURN 2009 attendees, presenters, and speakers for your contributions. Because of you, the event was a lively exchange of experiences covering software, system, system of systems, and enterprise architecting. And SATURN 2009 was the most attended SATURN Conference in its five-year history!

In case you missed this year's conference, here are just a few of the highlights:

• In his keynote titled Architecture Is Architecture, John Zachman described how he based his enterprise architecture framework on basic architectural principles borrowed from other disciplines. His talk reaffirmed in a lively way that, without a doubt, complex systems need architecture to be designed, analyzed, and built.
• Several attendees alluded to a need to justify the time they spend architecting to their managers. While many would agree that we cannot afford to not spend time architecting, justifying that time and quantifying the value of architecting remains a challenge. While collecting the right set of data for such analysis is not a straightforward task, several organizations shared their progress in this area, including a study the SEI conducted on the impact of U.S. Army architecture evaluations.
• Architecture competence is an increasingly popular topic for individuals and organizations alike. To produce architectures that enable high-quality systems, both individuals and organizations must increase their competency in architecture. Together, the session on this topic and the birds-of-a-feather session resulted in a valuable exchange of ideas.
• Architecture evaluations—as in the previous SATURN Conferences—continue to be a key area of interest. Rebecca Wirfs-Brock discussed evaluations in her keynote address titled Lessons Learned from Architecture Reviews. She based that talk on her experiences, presentations, a birds-of-a-feather session on system of system evaluations, and an information session that described the key principles of evaluation and showed how the SEI Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) implements them.

Now that a successful SATURN 2009 is behind us, preparations for 2010 are underway. We've already picked a date and location: May 17-21, 2010 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Look for more conference details starting September 7, 2009. Meanwhile, if you would like SATURN 2010 to include a particular topic, speaker, or activity, let us know at saturn@sei.cmu.edu.

Thank you all for a great conference, and be sure to check out the SATURN blog for great discussions on architecture-centric engineering.

See you in Minneapolis!

– Ipek Ozkaya, SEI

 

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon University.