Keynotes

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Sridhar Iyengar
IBM Corporation

Improving Architectural Composability and Consumability using Communities: Lessons learned from Eclipse, SOA and MDA

Abstract:

The last few years has seen a great acceleration in the convergence of two communities - the open standards community that is setting a foundation for how global, interoperable software intensive systems can be specified and the open source community which is implementing many of these standards. As the pace of software complexity continues to accelerate - we are assembling and integrating software that is produced by a global community - new challenges are driving architectural innovation. How can we design these systems with composability in mind while at the same time improving the productivity & consumability (by archiects as well as users) of the systems we deliver. The move towards Model Driven Architecture (MDA) Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)- the 'Architecture word is respectable now! - and many of the open source projects at eclipse.org and apache.org that implement these specifications clearly illustrate this trend. What is missing? - A focus on 'consumability' : How can we use motivating scenarios from end users that drive the implementation of these standards as we continue our thirst for simplifying and managing software complexity. The talk will conclude with some late breaking information on how some of the key emerging MDA and SOA standards are converging and building a foundation for the next wave of standards & innovation in Business Process Management.

Biography:

Sridhar Iyengar an IBM Distinguished Engineer from the IBM Rational CTO Team works in IBM and in the open standards and open source community to accelerate the adoption of Model Driven & Service Oriented Architectures. His work focuses on the use of models, metadata, patterns and transformation frameworks that can be used create an integrated software development platform built using industry standards and the open source Eclipse framework. Sridhar holds several patents in the areas of modeling, metadata management, application development and integration. Sridhar led the definition of the initial MOF and XMI standards and their integration and use by UML and now the MDA suite of standards. Sridhar serves on the IBM Software Group Architecture Board Steering Committee & the OMG Architecture Board and (to get a reality check on the promise of new technologies!) works extensively with customers who are at the forefront of exploiting emerging technologies.

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Steve Easterbrook
University of Toronto

Scale Changes Everything: Understanding the Requirements for Systems of Systems

Abstract:

Software technology now penetrates almost every aspect of our lives in complex ways. The reality of 21st century software development is that software itself is but one part of a complex system-of-systems that includes a broad technological infrastructure along with a wide set of human activities. The technological systems and the human activity systems have a symbiotic relationship - each shapes the other in complex ways, such that neither can be understood in isolation. A recent report from the SEI on Ultra-Large Scale (ULS) Systems accurately characterized the nature of these systems-of- systems: they have no centralized control; experience normal failures and continual evolution of heterogeneous elements; and their requirements are inherently conflicting, diverse and often unknowable. For design purposes, the boundary between people and software disappears - design is as much about shaping the human activities as it is about constructing the software.

In this talk, I will argue that these challenges are now true of most software development. The engineering approaches we use today for software development only work when we take a very narrow view of the requirements, as well-defined sets of features and interfaces, which can be fully specified. This approach helps us to build components that conform (in a narrow sense) to their specifications. But we cannot tell in advance whether they will be any use in any of the many different systems-of-systems in which they may be deployed. Our engineering techniques rapidly break down when we attempt to scale up our design ambitions. The result is a growing gap between expectations and practice in the software industry. We can build very reliable software at the small scale, for tightly constrained problems. But we cannot build reliable software for complex socio- technical domains.

To make progress on these challenges we need to abandon the idea that we can write complete, consistent specifications. Instead, we need to capture the multiple, conflicting requirements for each software component that arise from its different contexts of use. We need to be able to express our partial understandings of the broader systems- of-systems in which our components will be deployed. And we need to be able to reason about the properties, and end-to-end behaviours of these systems, without resolving all the unknowns and inconsistencies in our models. I will end the talk with a survey of recent research in requirements engineering that tackles these challenges. In particular I will discuss techniques for managing large, evolving collections of fragmentary requirements models, and show how it is possible to tolerate inconsistency when we reason about the properties of these models.

Biography:

Steve Easterbrook is a Professor of Computer Science at University of Toronto, and academic director of Bell University Laboratories. He received his PhD in 1991 from Imperial College, London, on the topic of negotiation and conflict resolution for software requirements. He joined the faculty in the School of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, where he pioneered new degree programs in human- centered software design. From 1995 to 1999, he led the research team at NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in West Virginia, and acted as an expert advisor on the independent assessment and IV&V contracts for the Space Shuttle Flight Software, the International Space Station, the Earth Observation System, as well as several planetary probes. In 1999 he joined the faculty at U of T, where he continues his research and teaching in software requirements analysis and inconsistency management. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in software and requirements engineering. He served as general chair for the International Symposium on Requirements Engineering in 2001 and the program chair for the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering in 2006, and has served on the program committees for many conferences and workshops in Requirements Engineering and Software Engineering.

Friday, March 2, 2007

Mark Schenecker
SAP Labs LLC

SOA: Some Assembly Required

Abstract:

The ability of an organization to reinvent itself, then build and execute a new business process or business model, has improved little over the last thirty years. More and more, the business environment (mergers, acquisitions, new partnerships, spin-offs) is changing faster than enterprise architectures can respond. Architects confront having to embrace rapid change in enterprise information systems across multiple internal legacy applications as well as the external systems of key trading partners. COTS vendors are responding by inverting their delivery model. Enterprise-class systems that provide comprehensive business process functionality with integration at the fringe are now being delivered piecemeal in the form of thousands of services that inherently embody integration. This new architectural style delivers immense flexibility and agility but there are challenges in assembling robust, scalable and reliable enterprise solutions.

Biography: