This is the second and last part of my SATURN 2016 conference report. Since I posted the first part, the organizers have posted video recordings of many of the best talks, and more will follow on the SATURN playlist on YouTube.

Ethical and social considerations in software architecture design featured in many talks, but most prominently in three short “DEV@SATURN” talks by Michael Keeling, João de Sousa and Bett Bollhoefer. DEV@SATURN was a new feature this year: 15 minute talks in the plenary sessions, which yielded some enjoyable and interesting food for thought; I would say a successful experiment. Michael presented a reasoning framework for ethical considerations in architectural decision making, including some reusable quality attribute scenarios for environmental sustainability and fairness to customers and developers. João reported on his work to develop an Internet of Things interaction framework (“Bezirk”) that shifts the power to control data exchanges from companies and application developers to end users – an architecture that gives app users more choices than just the two bad options we are generally given now: give access to everything the app demands or the app doesn’t work at all. João received the conference’s New Directions award for his talk. Bett gave us a glimpse of the insights into mindful software development she gathered in a “Zen of Software Development” booklet (and got the whole audience to do some yoga on the spot…).

Other highlights

For me, the most interesting keynote was Daniel Jackson’s “Rethinking Software Design”. It was mostly about user experience design, and the word “architecture” only appeared once – but Daniel presented some keen insights into the impact of bad user interaction design at the architectural level. Software and solution architects generally do not get very much involved in user interaction design, especially those schooled in the SEI architecture practices, which are mostly based on the notion that non-functional requirements and quality attributes drive architectural design. But isn’t usability also a quality attribute? Bad user interaction design has a substantial risk and cost impact, and can cause a project to fail – both strong indicators that user interaction design is architecturally significant, and thus should be addressed by architects.

Another highlight was Eoin Woods’ talk on Getting your system in production – and keeping it there. 90 minutes of great practical advice. Eoin is a star at systematically presenting solutions, and illustrates each and every point he makes with an amusing (or dramatic) real-life story. Like user interaction, production is another area architects sometimes underestimate, or at best have an ad-hoc approach to. If you have a few minutes, peruse Eoin’s slides, and if you have some more time, watch his presentation here.

At the close of the conference, I had the honor of receiving the first Linda Northrop Software Architecture Award, a few minutes after Linda herself gave a very nice overview keynote on the status of the software architecture practice. It felt great to get such international recognition for the hard work my CGI colleagues and I put into improving the way we do architecture, during a decade in which the whole idea of up-front design was widely discredited by the mainstream software development community. As noted above, the pendulum seems to be swinging back in the other direction now, and people are back modeling systems in order to build better software – hopefully, before long, with the door open again.

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!

The other talks and panel discussion at Life at Nedap.

Another great SATURN  (the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Architecture Technology User Network) conference in Baltimore this year. The setting was a bit surreal – due to social unrest and a curfew(!) we couldn’t really explore the city during the conference, and were pretty much confined to the conference hotel. After three days of intense knowledge exchange, it was a pale, squinting collection of software architects that emerged from the Lord Baltimore Hotel – tired but satisfied. As predicted by George Fairbanks at the start, it was also the “most annoying SATURN ever” – in the sense that there were four parallel tracks, and whichever one I chose to attend, I always knew that there was at least one other very interesting thing going on in one of the other “salons”. Fortunately, many sessions were videotaped and can be viewed on-line.

Finally, software architects on the streets of Baltimore #SATURN15 pic.twitter.com/kDKnns1FG9

— Eltjo Poort (@eltjopoort) May 1, 2015

Last year‘s most prominent topic was DevOps, and it was still prominent on this year’s event. Another topic that keeps attracting attention is the interplay between architecture and agile delivery, the topic of my own two contributions. The rest of the sessions could roughly be divided in coding-oriented (in which MicroServices was the most discussed topic) and business-oriented subjects. I mostly attended the latter.

 The conference opened with a great keynote address by Mary Shaw about the progress of Software Engineering as an engineering discipline. Mary had studied various engineering disciplines and abstracted a simple and elegant lifecycle, highlighting the growth of a discipline from art to production, commerce, science and eventually engineering. According to Shaw’s model, something is a real engineering discipline if the combination of science, art, production and commerce allows “ordinary” trained people to be systematically successful (as opposed to an art that can only be masted by virtuosi). Mary’s conclusion was “we aren’t quite there yet”.

 Right after the keynote it was my turn to lead a participatory session on “Maximizing your business value as an architect“, and I felt priviliged that the room was packed with 50 practicing architects from all kinds of organizations.  The discussions were lively, most participated vigorously in the exercise (“prioritize architectural concerns by risk and cost”), and almost all participants indicated they would be able to use the approach immediately in their daily work. I’d like to thank all participants for making this such a gratifying session.

 On Wednesday morning, InspearIT’s Jochem Schulenklopper gave the presentation that would win the Architecture in Practice award: “Why they just don’t get it: communicating architecture to business stakeholders.” Jochem made some excellent points about the need for architects to learn and communicate in business stakeholders’ language. Learning a language is not trivial and requires exposure. And using a modeling language like UML or ArchiMate to communicate with business stakeholders is useless: you will quickly find yourself explaining the language in stead of explaining the architecture. After the session, even Len Bass indicated that he had learned new insights from Jochem’s talk – a true compliment! Wednesday afternoon started with another great keynote, by Gregor Hohpe: “It’s good to be architect”. Gregor had some very interesting insights into the value of architects to organizations, such as “If you make architecture a second class citizen, you will attract second-class architects who build a third-class architecture”. His metaphor of the “architecture elevator” immediately struck a chord: the value of architects can be measured by how many levels of hierarchy and abstraction they can traverse quickly. Good architects talk to technical engineers and translate their concerns in such a way that they get the attention they deserve at C-level. Conversely, they make the translation of policy and business goals all the way through to the levels below. Gregor posted his own SATURN impressions here.

Value of architect is measured by # of levels of abstraction and hierarchy they can cross quickly #SATURN15 G.Hohpe pic.twitter.com/DNQE8OONSj — Eltjo Poort (@eltjopoort) April 29, 2015

 Thursday morning we discussed Fast and Slow Thinking for architects with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock: apart from “be aware of all your biases”, Rebecca had a valuable tip about using pre-mortems at the start of projects to fight some of the more dangerous biases. A pre-mortem is a group exercise in which attendants imagine they are in the future: the project has failed, and everyone describes the scenario that led to failure. A great remedy against WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is), availability bias etc. I also gave my presentation “Agilizing the Architecture Department”, about our experiences implementing RCDA at ProRail.

 In the closing keynote, Mark Schwartz of the US Citizenship and Immigration services gave a fascinating and very frank account of a large governement organization’s struggle to find the right architecture organization form to balance agile delivery with cross-system architectural reasoning. Is it Architect as Teacher? Architecture as a Service? The final verdict is still out…

Thanks to all participants who were cooped up together and made this another great SATURN. And it’s not over yet: we still have to watch the recorded trackes that we didn’t attend, so we’ll be busy for a while yet. Next year: San Diego.