Peter C. Bahrs

Smarter Architecture & Engineering: Game changer for requirements management: A position paper

This paper addresses the challenges of large commercial and government that struggle with requirements understanding, increasing delivery quality and estimating costs. The paper discusses Smarter Architecture & Engineering (SmarterAE) as an approach that applies scrutiny, metrics and analysis to architecture, requirements management and engineering as is historically given to development, testing and operations. SmarterAE facilitates business agility by capturing the essence of the enterprise business into an actionable business architecture. It treats IT architecture, requirements, engineering as key business processes and accelerates acceptance among users, business stakeholders, development, testing and operations. The approach is based on Best Practices and encourages asset reuse and management.

A predictive business agility model for service oriented architectures

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is now considered a mainstream option for delivering solutions that promise business agility benefits. Unfortunately, there is currently no quantitative approach for predicting the expected agility of a SOA system under development. In this paper we present an empirically validated Predicted Business Agility Index (PBAI) which is designed to measure the expected business agility of a SOA deployment. The PBAI is constructed through statistically analyzing the relationship between 150 technical attributes and the attainment of business agility in 39 SOA deployments. 37 of the technical attributes, classified into three areas of architecture, business process management, and impact analysis are determined to be the primary contributors to achieving business agility. The PBAI is evaluated using a leave-one-out cross validation experiment of the SOA projects in our study.

Beyond Anecdotal Thinking: Deepening Our Understanding for Achieving Quality Goals

Quality goals for security, business agility, maintainability and other such attributes are often achieved through implementing best practices. To know which stakeholder goals are attainable and how they can best be achieved, we must empirically evaluate software development beliefs and practices. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/gLHkN_5wVCc is an audio podcast in which author Jane Cleland-Huang speaks with coauthor Mamoun Hirzalla from the Requirements column about the importance of challenging ideas, questioning beliefs, and understanding how various development practices and technical decisions can help or hinder the achievement of development goals.