Software Architecture

June 6, 2002

Location: Electrical Engineering/Computer Science Bldg, Room EE/Csi 3-180

Abstract:

Increasingly complex software-intensive systems, reuse, quality, and the need to understand have dramatically increased the importance of software architecture.  Companies are beginning to recognize the need to reason about their products at an architectural level and as product lines.

This talk will introduce software architecture covering the breadth of software architecture as it relates to the customer, the business, the product's quality attributes, and the development process.   We'll investigate the role of the architect, various architecture "schools of thought," evaluating architectures, reconstructing the architecture, representing the architecture, and architectural styles and patterns.

Presentation Outline
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• What is software architecture?
• Very early ideas of architecture
• Brook's "Conceptual Integrity"
• Background & history leading to recent work
• Relation to "System Engineering" and "System Architecture"
• Architecture & Quality(ies)
• Architecture & Business
• Architecture in the development process
• Architecture in the CMM (and CMMI?) KPAs
• Where is architecture in Waterfall, Spiral, Incremental
• Architecture throughout the product's lifecycle
• Architecture in Agile Development processes
• The role of the architect
•            What is the role?
•            Who is right for the role?
• Architecture and product line practice
• What makes a "good" architecture?
•            No good or bad, just degrees of "fitness for a given purpose"
•            Basic organizational/process rules
•            Technical rules
• Overview the Architecture "schools of thought" (Mowbray's Software
• Architecture as a Discipline paper, see http://www.componentworld.nu/corp/Developer/Articles/dev.art5a.asp or http://www.pithecanthropus.com/~awg/mobray.html)
• Zachman Framework
• Open Distributed Processing (ODP) by ISO
• Domain Analysis
• Rational's 4+1 view
• SEI
• Architecture evaluations/reviews (ATAM, SAAM)
• Architecture and software economics
• Architecture representation
• Views (big list of views and their uses, 4+1 view)
• Modeling (box & lines, UML, ADLs, Agile Modeling)
• Documenting (IEEE 1471, HP, others)
• Architecture recovery/reconstruction
• Architecture styles/patterns

• Areas of current interest and study

• For more information see...
•            Key references
•            SEI
•            WWISA
• Big list of links...

About the Speaker:

Mike Barton is a software engineer at Guidant. Until recently, he was a principal software engineer at Digi International where his roles included software and system engineering for network connectivity devices. At Digi he was also a leader for user interface development and process improvement. Mike focuses on requirements engineering and product-line software architecture definition and evolution. Prior to Digi International, Mike was a software engineer at Goodrich Inc. developing hard real-time embedded software for military aircraft. He has also worked at Caterpillar Inc. developing control systems software and hardware devices. Mike Barton holds a holds a M.S. in Software Engineering from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Valparaiso University in Indiana. He is a member of the IEEE and Worldwide Institute of Software Architects.