SATURN (the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) Conference) has become my favorite annual professional event. What a great mix of architects, developers and researchers, and what a nice way to learn from each other.
The pervasive theme at this year’s SATURN was DevOps. Throughout the conference it became clear that DevOps is not just a hype-movement “taking agile to the next level”. DevOps will quickly become the standard way to produce a significant part of the world’s software. It is the only way to achieve real web-scale IT, supported by a high degree of automation – and by a strong architecture foundation to ensure qualities like reliability, availability and security.
The goodness started with Stephany Bellomo and Rick Kazman’s tutorial on the architectural foundations for achieving DevOps goals – most notably “deployability”. Stephany and Rick have looked into a number of cases to identify architectural strategies and tactics to decrease deployment time. They did not find any new techniques, but found that existing strategies often needed to be revisited to achieve DevOps goals. According to Stephany, DevOps forces architects to think about streamlining: removing stuff rather than adding. In some cases, this meant removing SOA components… which was ironic, since Stephany is one of the SEI’s leading SOA experts.
DevOps forces architect to think about streamlining: removing stuff rather than adding – Stephanie Bellomo #SATURN14 pic.twitter.com/lvRSjIxu62
— Eltjo Poort (@eltjopoort) May 6, 2014
On Tuesday afternoon, I gave my own tutorial about Agile Solution Architecting. We had a nice crowd, which included OO design guru Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. Great discussions and feedback.
Wednesday had a nice keynote on refactoring by Bill Opdyke of JPMorgan Chase – some interesting points about making the business case for refactoring to your stakeholders reminded me of a previous blog post. In a session on Customer Collaboration, Samsung told us how they analyzed Twitter data to gather quality attribute requirements for their Galaxy model S5 – quite revealing. My presentation on the Costing View of Architecture was part of the afternoon’s Leadership and Business session.
#SATURN14 Eltjo Poort gives some points on the impact of architecture on project cost pic.twitter.com/hKgD9KpMkY
— Bett Correa (@betterworkinc) May 7, 2014
The final session on Wednesday triggered some great discussion on fostering architecture communities in companies, which led to the creation of a LinkedIn group to allow the discussion to continue after the conference.
Thursday’s highlights were the two keynotes. Netflix’s Dianne Marsh told the story of the open source based tool stack supporting continuous delivery at Netflix. Very inspiring to see DevOps at work, although Dianne’s remark that she “never had to argue a business case or think much about cost” caused some of us to wonder whether successful DevOps implemenations were dependent on unlimited budget availability…
In the closing keynote, IBM’s Jerome Presenti gave us an awesome glimpse into the future. Jerome’s team develops cognitive systems, based on the IBM Watson system that won the Jeopardy quiz. It looks like the “Minds” in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels are closer than we think… 🙂
On Friday, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock gave a tutorial on “Being Agile about System Qualities”. In terms of concepts, Rebecca’s had a lot of overlap with my own tutorial on Tuesday – but she explained them from the point of view of the agile mindset, which was quite enlightening. Architects can gain more traction with agile teams by being aware of their jargon (e.g. say “Design Spike” in stead of “Architectural Prototype”) and allergies (e.g. don’t use Powerpoint…). Perhaps we should stop using the A-word alltogether, and rather call ourselves “Master Builder” as suggested to me yesterday by a chief architect in a client organization…
All in all, a great week, many new ideas and new friends. Many thanks to all participants and organizers!
Edit (October 2014): you can now watch my Saturn talk (and most others as well) on YouTube: