This year’s SATURN (Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Architecture Technology User Network Conference) was held in San Diego from May 2-5. Compared to last year, the geographical context was much improved – Southern California felt a lot more relaxed than Baltimore under curfew. The conference organizers had once again prepared an excellent technical program, and as always it was sometimes difficult to choose between tracks – everything was interesting. Fortunately, all presentations were video-recorded, and should appear on the conference website soon.

The fantastic opening keynote was by community guru Grady Booch, who gave us a peek into the future of architecting. He talked about “abstracting the unknown”: architecting the kind of systems that stretch us both technically, socially and ethically. His talk set the stage for a number of central themes that pervaded the program: evolutionary architecture, ethical considerations, and the renewed recognition of the role of modeling (the real world) and intentional design in software engineering. Slides 43-45 in Grady’s presentation give an elegant summary of the modern view of why and how we architect. As for architecting the unknown, it is clear that there is much less opportunity for reuse, and that we need a method that allows our intuition to play a much more prominent role.

Grady Booch’s tips when you find yourself having to architect the unknown.

Evolutionary architecture and roadmapping was the topic of talks by Patrick Kua, David Adsit, Alejandro Bianchi, Pierre Pureur (continuous architecture) and myself, and of a keynote by IoT frontrunner Joseph Salvo. The common message here seems to be that the “dot on the horizon”, the architected future state, is becoming less meaningful in a world that changes faster than architectures can be realized. We therefore need architectures and architecting practices that are flexible and resilient enough to maintain their value in a rapidly changing business or technological context. We all reported on our experiences implementing such practices, in my own case introducing an evolution viewpoint to help achieve just enough anticipation in your architecture.

Modeling the real world seems to be a prerequisite for an architecture to have that flexibility and resilience. I remember teaching this in Object Oriented Analysis and Design classes in the 90s, but it seems that insight is resurfacing now after having been deprecated by overzealous agilistas for a while. This was the topic of talks by Amber Haley, Arila Barnes and George Fairbanks, and played an important role in Daniel Jackson’s excellent Wednesday morning keynote. George talked about the stigma clinging to modeling in some agile teams, and “modeling with the door shut” to avoid being seen practicing such a shameful activity. It was also funny to see that modern modelers are developing their own, new languages for domain modeling, where we successfully used UML in the past. It seems UML is now so much associated with technical design that people don’t recognize it as a domain modeling language anymore, and feel the need to reinvent the wheel… for similar reasons, much of what we used to call architecture now seems to be relabeled “design thinking”.

There is much more to report on SATURN 2016 – next installment coming up soon!