Nanette Brown

Analysis and Management of Architectural Dependencies in Iterative Release Planning

Within any incremental development paradigm, there exists a tension between the desire to deliver value to the customer early and the desire to reduce cost by avoiding architectural refactoring in subsequent releases. What is lacking, however, is quantifiable guidance that highlights the potential benefits and risks of choosing one or the other of these alternatives or a blend of both strategies. In this paper, we assert that the ability to quantify architecture quality with measurable criteria provides engineering guidance for iterative release planning. We demonstrate the use of propagation cost as a proxy for architectural health with dependency analysis of design structure and domain mapping matrices as a quantifiable basis for iteration planning.

Managing technical debt in software development: report on the 2nd international workshop on managing technical debt, held at ICSE 2011

The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the software development community as a way to understand and communicate about issues of intrinsic quality, value, and cost. This is a report on a second workshop on managing technical debt, which took place as part of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011). The goal of this second workshop was to discuss the management of technical debt: to assess current practice in industry and to further refine a research agenda for software engineering in this area.

Hard choice: A game for balancing strategy for agility

Summary form only given. This presentation will cover recent developments in the theory of negative imaginary systems and their application to the control of highly resonant flexible structures. The theory of negative imaginary systems arose out of a desire to unify a number of classical methods for the control of lightly damped structures with collocated force actuators and position sensors including positive position feedback and integral force feedback. The key result is a stability result which shows why these methods are guaranteed to yield robust closed loop stability in the face of unmodelled spillover dynamics. Related results to be presented connect the theory of negative imaginary systems to positive real systems theory and a negative imaginary lemma has been established which is analogous to the positive real lemma. The presentation will also discuss recent controller synthesis results based on the theory of negative imaginary systems along with applications in the aerospace area such as the control of large space flexible structures.

Architecting with just enough information

We learned an important lesson recently about breaking down barriers among architects, developers, and other stakeholders when we were engaged on a project and were challenged to deliver the architecture in smaller increments and shorter iterations. We learned how information was used and exchanged among key players participating in the software development process and are seeking to formalize our understanding through principles of workflow from lean software development and how architecture knowledge management can influence defining an appropriate architecture batch size for effective incremental development.