VanDev: Architectural Knowledge = Architectural Decisions + Architectural Design

We're overbooked again on this meeting and, since the RSVPs are not a reliable estimate of attendance, we'll be accepting people on a first-come basis until we reach the 50 limit for the room (usually about 70 Yes RSVPs). Please keep your RSVP up-to-date since those who can't come early will want to know if they can expect to get in. Thanks. Doors open at 6:30.

Update: No door prizes this month - it seems that our door prize books got delivered to the wrong people and the reshipment won't make it in time for this meeting.

Also note that Meetup has a new way of reporting the number of attendees which reports high unless I do a lot of work so please interpret past attendances as being at most 50.

Overview:

In March we're hosting UBC's Prof. Philippe Kruchten who'll be presenting on software architectural knowledge. Software architecture is increasingly important as software systems grow in complexity and, in order to understand our architectural designs, we also need the knowledge behind the many decisions that a particular design represents. Join us as Prof. Kruchten introduces the concept of architectural design knowledge and our current options to capture, communicate, and exploit its enormous value. Following the presentation we'll have round-the-room introductions and then open the floor for networking. This is a networking event so bring your business/contact cards and a story or two to share.

About the presentation:

Architectural knowledge consists of architecture design as well as the architectural design decisions, assumptions, context, and other factors that together determine why a particular solution is the way it is. Except for the architecture design part, where various notations (e.g., UML) or prototypes can help make it concrete, most of the architectural knowledge usually remains hidden, tacit in the heads of the architects. Capturing and visualizing a set of architecture decisions can constitute an alternative representation of the architecture and the architectural knowledge, which is helpful for building and evolving systems, for bridging software design with system design, for transmitting architectural knowledge, for education and training, and to provide at lower cost a design rationale.

In this presentation Prof. Kruchten will introduce the concept of architectural design knowledge and, using simple set of design decisions as an example, will look at various ways that architects can exploit this knowledge in practice. He'll also describe and discuss a few challenges still ahead for both researchers and practitioners.

About the speaker:

Philippe Kruchten is a professor of software engineering in the department of electrical and computer engineering of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. He joined UBC in 2004 after a 30+ year career in industry, where he worked mostly in with large software-intensive systems design, in the domains of telecommunication, defence, aerospace and transportation. Some of his experience is embodied in the Rational Unified Process (RUP) whose development he directed from 1995 till 2003, when Rational Software was bought by IBM. RUP includes an architectural design method, known as ?RUP 4+1 views?. His current research interests still reside mostly with software architecture, and in particular architectural decisions and the decision process, as well as software engineering processes, in particular the application of agile processes in large and globally distributed teams. He is a senior member of IEEE CS, member of ACM and INCOSE, the co-founder of Agile Vancouver, and a Professional Engineer in British Columbia. He has a diploma in mechanical engineering from Ecole Centrale de Lyon, and a doctorate degree in informatics from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris.