Software Engineering Institute

April 16, 2018—The 14th SEI Architecture User Network (SATURN) Conference will take place May 7-8 in Plano, Texas, near Dallas. SATURN organizers have crafted a technical program designed to engage attendees on a host of relevant topics.

“SATURN 2018 offers more than 40 peer-reviewed talks,” noted conference general chair William Pollak. “We’re also offering training courses and the popular Software Architecture Boot Camp sessions.” The conference sessions explore a wide range of topics relevant to practicing architects, including DevOps, blockchain, REST, machine learning, continuous delivery, technical debt, agility and architecture, cloud computing, refactoring, microservices, data privacy, and a panel discussion titled “Death of the Architect.”

The program also features the following keynote addresses:

• Rebecca Parsons, chief technology officer at ThoughtWorks, will speak about the whys and hows of evolutionary architecture. In particular, she will focus on the central role of fitness functions in driving the architecture in the desired direction and how techniques such as refactoring databases and continuous delivery support architectural evolution.
• Ricardo Valerdi, associate professor at the University of Arizona, where he is director of the Sports Management Program, will speak about the use of virtual reality for football concussion education.
• Michael Nygard of Cognitect, Inc., will share his thoughts on the concept of Uncoupling.

In addition to the keynotes, the program also includes a strong lineup of invited speakers:

• Vaughn Vernon of Comprehension, Inc. will present Reactive DDD: Modeling Uncertainty and discuss how the uncertainty introduced by distributed computing can be finessed into highly functioning, business-centric systems that teams can design, develop, and reason about.
• Independent technical consultant Daniel Bryant will address continuous delivery with containers.
• James Lewis of ThoughtWorks will present Betting on Evolutionary Architecture: A Note on Software Architecture as Code.
• Aroop Pandya of IBM Watson will discuss Watson Cognitive Services and Cloud Platform Architecture.
• Chris Richardson of Eventuate, a keynote speaker at SATURN in 2017, will present Managing Data Consistency in a Microservice Architecture Using Sagas.

John Klein and Paulo Merson, technical co-chairs for SATURN 2018, have provided a more detailed preview of the keynotes, invited presentations, and technical program in a post on the SATURN Blog. 

To learn more about SATURN 2018 or to register, visit https://www.sei.cmu.edu/saturn.