Software Architecture

What is a “software architect” anyway? And how do individuals and organizations get better at software architecture?

Paul Clements of Carnegie-Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute looked at these issues in “Measuring and Improving Architecture Competence,” a presentation in IASA Architecture Thinking Series sponsored by Microsoft.

Points along the way:

• Clements’ team conducted a survey of broadcast, training & educational, and “architecting for a living” sources. He focused on what people say software architecture is rather than debating what it should be in order to develop a model of duties, skills, and knowledge was developed
• Communication — listening, writing, speaking — and interpersonal skills — leadership, patience, and politics — are critical capabilities
• As one might expect, training & educational sources values that differ with “architecting for living” sources
• Architects should be “jacks of all trades” who can readily identify a solution that they’ve previously applied to a similar problem previously
• Competence is: Carrying out duties, having the skills, knowing the knowledge

It was interesting to note that this talk was targeted — both by time of day and also through side comments — to India’s software organization.

An archived version of the presentation is supposed to be available from the IASA web site later this week.

Buildix: Project In A Box

Buildix is development project infrastructure in a box. Just add a virtual machine .

Thoughtworks, the ubiquitous IT consultancy with whom Martin Fowler is associated, sponsors this collection of pre-integrated and ready-to-roll project management tools.

Technologies include:

• trac Edgewall’s open-source “Integrated SCM and Project Management” (Subversion + Wiki + defect tracking)
• Subversion the open-source next-generation to CVS
• CruiseControl open-source build automation

Pros

• Works right out of the box. To run on Windows, download vmWare Player and the Buildix image, launch, and point your browser to the virtual IP address created by the VM.
• Promised integration features are nice (e.g., linking to defects by id from Wiki entries)

Cons

• As you’d expect, you’re stuck with the versions of the tools that they have chosen to pre-integrate. If you want to upgrade, you’ll need to work out any conflicts yourself (and you won’t have the benefit of the hard-won knowledge gained by integrating them in the first place.
• Documentation to back up some of the promised integration benefits (e.g., wiki syntax to link to issues, check-in syntax to tie to a particular issue) is difficult to find.

Recommendation

Worth a look if you would like to upgrade your project development infrastructure. Particularly useful to J2EE development, but also for anyone who can use ant to automate product builds.

I’m in the process of using it for a pilot project and will post any learnings along the way.