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Software Architecture do & describe |
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By Nagaraju Pappu and Satish Sukumar of Canopus Consulting | |
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11th, 12th & 13th September 2008, Bangalore |
Advanced Workshop for Practicing Software Architects |
| www.isqtinternational.com | www.canopusconsulting.com |
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About the workshop
With increasing cost and competitive pressures in the IT industry, the role of a software architect is becoming increasingly critical. Decisions, such as estimation and designs made by architects have a direct impact on the profitability of organizations. Today’s software architect is required to be a multi-skilled, multi-specialty expert with skills that extend beyond technical skills at the level of platforms such as J2EE or .Net. Architects today are called to perform several roles within an organization including:
· The design of solutions and architecture within the scope of projects
· Developing technology and architecture stacks that become Intellectual Property of an organization going far beyond reuse programs
· Working on enterprise architectures and solution frameworks,
· Working on domain specific architectures and domain specific frameworks such as BASEL-II or ITIL
· Design of solutions at the RFP/Proposal response stage where the challenge is to come up with the appropriate solution and accurate estimate in a very short period of time – often even a few days
At the same time, the nature of systems an architect is called upon
to design and develop is in itself getting increasingly complex. The designs
of today must deliver to stringent Non Functional Requirements , with several
organizations adopting value based costing methods which penalizes the development
organization for instances of software delivery with lower than acceptable
quality.
Architects who have been successful in building solutions for customer projects now need a new set of skills to replicate this success into the new roles they have to play. While there is a lot of information on “what” architecture at this level is and even on architecture standards, there is very little information on “how” architecture of this kind can be done.
This three day workshop addresses this gap. It is designed and delivered by seasoned practitioners who have more than 15 years of individual experience in the design and development of complex software systems and software product lines. This workshop has a special focus on designing for Non Functional Requirements, on problem solving techniques and on accurate estimation techniques for architects. This workshop is the second iteration of the highly successful “Software Architecture Do and Describe” workshop conducted along with IIT Kanpur in 2004.
Organization of the workshop:
The workshop presents software architecture as a problem solving methodology. The workshop combines real world case studies, the conceptual background that is required and a unique set of packaged design techniques that are readily usable by the participants of the workshop. The workshop is organized into two sequential tracks.
Track 1: Doing Software Architecture
The focus of this track is on architecture as a problem solving method. Designing architectures for meeting the Non Functional Requirements of a system is presented using a set of NFR modeling and design techniques along with several real world examples. The topics covered in this track include:
· Architecture driven requirements engineering
o Getting requirements right, validating and verifying a requirement at the requirements stage itself
o Techniques for defining NFR requirements
· Design for performance, scalability, availability and extensibility
o Techniques for dealing with growth in volume of data, in number of users and amount of usage
o High availability design techniques
o Performance modeling techniques
o Building language interfaces
· Data design and data engineering
o Dealing with very large volumes of data
o Performance engineering at the data design level
o Use of data warehousing techniques in transaction databases
· Component architecture and SOA
o 7 habits of effective components
o Component design and object design
o Reusable components and how to build them
o 8 libraries that are a must
o Service oriented computing
Track 2: Describing Software Architectures
Software architects working in services companies are required to respond rapidly to proposals. They must be able to provide workable solutions with accurate estimates while working with the minimal amounts of information’s normally available in a RFP. A software architect also needs to effectively communicate and defend the architecture to managers, to their own technical teams to customers and other stakeholders. This track provides the required set of techniques an architect needs to perform these tasks. This track covers the following topics:
· Reading and responding to RFPs
o How to read an RFP, what to look for, how do you estimate if the information provided is enough
o How do you respond to an RFP – what are the components of a response.
· The structure of winning proposals
o Writing good proposals
o Ensuring that the winning proposition is clearly communicated and stands out amongst all the other information provided in the response
o Small details of big importance
· Estimation techniques at the proposal stage
o Getting estimates right
o Techniques for estimating the complexity of a solution
o How do you estimate based on the actual work need to deliver the solution rather than using a methods such as functional breakdown
· Communicating architectures
o To technical teams
o To managers, customers and other stakeholders
o Architecture representation styles
· Architecture styles and standards
o An overview of the state of the art of Software Architecture
o Articulating the TOC of the solutions, describing architectures for quality engineering, designing experiments for validating Non-Functional Requirements like Performance, Scalability and Reliability.
Nagaraju has over 16 years of experience in information systems architecture,
software engineering, systems design, programming and quality engineering.
He has held research positions at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur,
worked as CTO for two technology companies and as a senior programmer at Oracle
and Fujitsu. Nagaraju is also a visiting professor at IIT-Kanpur and IIIT-Hyderabad
and has taught full semester courses on design theory, software engineering
and systems architecture. He has authored six patents.
Satish Sukumar