Architects: Accelerators or Anchors to Organizational Agility?

This keynote presentation was given by Jim Highsmith. Jim writes, "If the new stress is on agility, adaptability, and flexibility, then what is the role of architects and architecture in this environment? What is agility and should your organization have more of it? Are architecture and agile development compatible? How can architects accelerate agility in organizations?"

Managing Scale and Agility: Transformational Architecture for the Smart Grid

This keynote presentation was given by Wayne Longcore. He writes, "The world’s largest machine is not a mining truck, a space shuttle or a luxury cruise ship—and many of us interact with it every single day. The North American Power Grid, a magnificent achievement of the 20th century, was created back when carburetors were first put in cars. Today, much as a single hybrid vehicle has dozens of computers and sophisticated controls to optimize its energy usage, intelligently managing storage and navigation of the world’s largest machine is becoming more efficient, capable, and intelligent."

Software Architecture and Agility: A Clash of Two Cultures?

This IEEE Software presentation was given by Philippe Kruchten of the University of British Columbia. He writes, "Software architecture is taking a bad rap with the agilists and other proponents of agile and lean software development approaches: 'BUFD (big up-front design);' 'YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It);' 'massive documentation;' 'smells of waterfall;' these are common claims made about software architecture when it is portrayed as a typical nonagile practice. However, in certain classes of systems, ignoring architectural issues for too long causes teams to 'hit a wall' and collapse from a lack of architectural focus. But isn't 'Agile architecture' a paradox or an oxymoron? Aren't they two totally incompatible approaches?"

The Architect as Change Agent

This IEEE Software presentation was given by Linda Rising. Linda writes, "Architects, like the rest of us, struggle to influence our teams or organizations to adopt good ideas—whether we want to move our department to a better development method or suggest a Friday night movie for the family. We develop great solutions but struggle to make something happen. How can we influence change?"

Agile Architecting: Using Agile Principles to Agilitize the Architecting Process

This presentation was given by Amine Chigani from Virginia Tech. Amine writes, "Agile is a philosophy (or a way of thinking) rather than a set of practices (e.g., TDD, Pair-Programming) and methods (e.g. XP, Scrum, Lean, FDD). From an architecture perspective, there is value in incorporating Agile principles (and some practices) into architecture-centric methods to accommodate changes in architectural drivers during the development of a large-scale system."

An Architectural Decision Modeling Framework for SOA and Cloud Design

This presentation was given by Olaf Zimmermann of IBM Research GmbH. Olaf writes, "In this presentation, we demonstrate how reusable architectural decision models can support service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud design: We present an architectural decision modeling framework called SOA Decision Modeling (SOAD), which treats recurring architectural decisions as first-class architecture design artifacts."

Architecturally Focused Techniques for Managing System Evolution

This presentation was given by William Koscho. Koscho writes, "This paper describes methods, tools, and lessons learned for gaining better insight to the customer’s goals and an ontology for understanding how changes may support or conflict with existing goals; and recasts policies from the accounting and audit industry to minimize the risk that design decisions (as a result of the change) negatively impact the architecture’s ability to satisfy its goals."

Architecture and Agile, Friends or Enemies?

This presentation was given by Ger Schoeber of Sioux Embedded Systems B.V. Ger writes, "In this presentation, we will learn the applied approach and the lessons learned during the development of a high-tech consumer product. My presentation will show the marriage of a concrete architectural foundation and the agile development principles to come to a multi-disciplinary and multisite development process."

Architecture Certification Panel: SATURN 2010

SATURN 2010 included a panel discussion on architecture certification. We see the panel as an opportunity to explore the state of practice in architecture certification. This includes organizations that offer their internal certificate programs as part of a career ladder (e.g., Siemens, Raytheon), organizations with extensive architecture training and know-how, like the SEI, and external organizations like IASA.

Architecture Model Reconstruction Towards Change Scenario Evaluation

This presentation was given by Jens Doppelhamer of ABB Corporate Research. Jens writes, "Software architecture reconstruction helps architects to redocument existing systems and to check code conformance. Existing methods and tools for software architecture reconstruction do not support the structured evaluation of architectural change scenarios based on the reverse-engineered models. We have applied the novel architecture reconstruction method and tools of the EU-project Q-ImPrESS on a large-scale ABB software system from the process automation domain."

Assessing Commercial Off-the-Shelf Software in Industry Using ATAM and RUP Analysis

This presentation was given by Marcel Derosier of Ameriprise Financial, Inc. Marcel writes, "The use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components enables more timely implementation of software projects in industry, but the time spent in evaluation of a single product, particularly when critical shortcomings are discovered late in the process, can often impact the business advantages of a faster time-to-market. Using the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) in conjunction with high-level analysis artifacts based on modified Rational Unified Processes (RUPs) to manage scope and risk, teams are able to quickly evaluate COTS-based architectural solutions prior to contract finalization."

Cloud Computing Architecture

This presentation was given by Gerald Kaefer of Siemens AG Corporate Research and Technologies. Gerald writes, "This presentation will share software architectural aspects for cloud computing and lessons learned from projects."

Designing and Building Large-Scale Systems in an Agile World

This presentation was given by Stevie Borne and Dave Hendricksen of Thomson Reuters. They write, "We have discovered that designing architecture in an Agile world is not only possible, but leads to a better product for the customer. This presentation explores some pros and cons as well as successes and failures of using the Agile approach when designing large-scale systems."

Engineering Lessons for Systems of Systems Learned from Service-Oriented Systems

This presentation was given by Grace Lewis of the SEI. Grace writes, "There is an increasing trend towards interconnected systems of systems (SoSs) that provide capabilities that are not available in a single system. Many organizations, including the DoD, are already implementing these SoSs. However, existing software and system engineering practices do not scale well to SoS. SoS engineering is still an open problem with significant challenges."

Enterprise Architecture for the Smart Grid: A Status Update

This presentation was given by Elizabeth Sisley of the University of Minnesota. Elizabeth writes, "The Smart Grid is the next generation of the energy grid, which is currently being designed to deliver significant improvements. The necessary complexity involves many systems, products, and networks, all across many business and government entities."

Introducing Software Architecture Development Methods into a TSP-Based Development Company

This presentation was given by Humberto Cervantes of the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana - Iztapalapa. Humberto writes, "This presentation describes an ongoing project whose aim is to introduce software architecture development methods inside Quarksoft, a leading Mexican software development company certified at CMMI level 3."

Lessons Learned Adapting an Existing Architecture in a Changing Business Landscape

This presentation was given by Arthur Wright of Credit Suisse. Arthur writes, "This report briefly describes the order management and routing system of a major Swiss bank, broaches some of the architectural changes that we made, and discusses the valuable lessons we learned as we faced up to a variety of people and technical challenges."

Managing Software Interfaces of On-Board Automotive Controllers

This presentation was given by Anthony Tsakiris of Ford Motor Company. Anthony writes, "This presentation describes an effort to commonize the software interfaces among embedded subsystem controllers in Ford Motor Company cars and trucks."

Promoting Data-Centric Architectures

This presentation was given by Michael Jaeger of Siemens AG. Michael writes, "Applications keep becoming more and more data-intensive: the Internet keeps growing, applications process more data, wired and wireless connections continue to provide more bandwidth, and technologies like cloud computing seem to confirm this trend. However, on the other hand, we see that current state-of-the-art paradigms like SOA focus on interfaces and their operations. Engineers start with modeling components or services and their operations. The design of the architecture is primarily influenced by functionality."

Quality Attribute Workshop Experiences and Reflections

This presentation was given by Anders Wall of ABB. Anders writes, "This presentation describes experiences and reflections we have made from performing Quality Attribute Workshops (QAWs) at three different business units within ABB. All three systems are industrial software-intensive systems. The cases we report on include both evolutionary development of a product and revolutionary development."

The Use of Change Cases in Software System Architecting

This presentation was given by J.D. Baker of Armstrong Process Group. J.D. writes, "This presentation is based on the author’s experiences in multiple consulting engagements. It answers the question of what the content of a change case should be and how that content can be used throughout the course of architecture development. It discusses how change cases relate to the ATAM growth scenarios and how they can be employed in the development and assessment of software system architectures."

Using the Attribute-Driven Design for Automated Predictive Maintenance and Diagnostics of Complex Software Systems

This presentation was given by Aldo Dagnino of ABB. Aldo writes, "The objective of this presentation is to discuss how mining historical data that contains key performance indicators associated with the health of a large-scale system can help in its architecture configuration. By analyzing trends in changes in the key performance indicators (KPIs), knowledge about the health of the system can be obtained."