Working Session 1: On the challenges and future directions of architectural knowledge management

Organizers: Paris Avgeriou, Mohamed Soliman, Ian Gorton

Time: March 15, 13:30 – 15:00

Description: Architectural knowledge management is critical for software engineers to make reasonable design decisions. Throughout two decades of research in this field, researchers proposed approaches to systematically manage architectural knowledge. Nevertheless, software architects still depend on ad-hoc methods to find, share, document, and re-use architectural knowledge. In this working session, we aim to support future work in this field by exploring challenges and future directions of architectural knowledge management. The working session will start with four lightning talks from experts in this field: Anne Koziolek, Patricia Lago, Uwe Zdun, and Ian Gorton. These will be followed by separate groups` discussions on specific topics as identified and voted on by the attendees of the working session. Each group is going to focus on a specific topic and identify challenges and future directions. Finally, a summary of the discussions will be created and shared among the attendees.

 

Working Session 2:  Architecting cloud-native systems. Industrial Experiences on Tools, Methods, and Practices

Organizers: Davide Taibi, Tampere University, Finland

Time: March 15, 13:30 – 15:00

Description: Technologies are continuously evolving, and new methods, tools, and practices are constantly introduced in the market. From Microservice to serverless, to micro-frontend, data meshes, and many others. In this session, we will organize a spontaneous panel where participants will discuss the current evolution of technologies in the industry, how academia can support the industry in the identification of the most appropriate technologies, and demystifying the hypes.

Working Session 3:  Architecting with autonomous teams

Organizers: Eltjo Poort, Architecture Practice Lead, CGI and Arjan Van Krimpen, Enterprise Architect, Transavia

Time: March 16, 13:30 – 15:00

Description: We see that an increasing amount of organizations are moving their named architect roles towards a support/coach role for agile teams, where the actual architectural decisions are made by the teams, and not by the architects. This requires a shift in competencies not just for the architects, but also for the team members: they have to learn how to identify architectural concerns and make architectural decisions. They also have to identify concerns that may affect other teams and collaborate on addressing those by making “transversal” decisions. We’ll tell the story of how we are making those changes in Transavia, an airline organization, and will discuss our challenges, hoping to generate ideas for improvements together with the attendees.

Working Session 4:  Software: the revolution of the automotive domain

Organizers: Patrizio Pelliccione,  GSSI, Italy, and Hoai Hoang Bengtsson, System Architect of Volvo

Time: March 16, 13:30 – 15:00

Description: Automotive companies are becoming software companies and software is increasingly playing a key role in innovation. Among the various challenges the domain is experiencing, we mention automation and smartness, electrification, and connectivity. This working session will focus on the software revolution that is shocking the automotive domain and specifically on the architectural implications. The working session will have a first lightning talk from Hoai Hoang Bengtsson (System Architect of Volvo Cars) about the evolution of the automotive software and electronics architecture towards a software-defined vehicle. The second lightning talk from David Garlan (Carnegie Mellon University – CMU, USA) will highlight human aspects and interaction between humans and vehicles. Then, Ian Gorton (Northeastern University, USA) will put the focus on continuous development, agile architecting, and technical debt. Finally, according to time constraints, Patrizio Pelliccione (GSSI, Italy) will stimulate a discussion on the need for strategies and instruments for continuous compliance with safety and security standards. The program might be subject to changes according to the time restrictions and discussion directions.

Working Session 5: Validation of software architecture research

Organizers: Anne Koziolek, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Time: March 17, 13:30 – 15:00

Description: If you would like to discuss how your research results should be evaluated by PC members of conferences, then this session is for you! 😉

With the existing guidelines for empirical software engineering research, there seems to be quite a good understanding of how to applythe various empirical methods. However, it still seems that it is hard to determine how software architecture research contributions shall bevalidated. As a doctoral researcher, it is difficult to determine how to validate your novel research contribution in the area of software architecture. Among PC members of conferences, there can be disagreement about what kinds of validation and even what evaluation questions are appropriate for a given research contribution.In this working session, we aim to work on a better-shared understanding how to validate software architecture research contributions and to come up with guidelines for researchers and PC members alike. An hypothesis we would like to explore in the session is that validation should provide evidence about a property of a research object with a suitable evaluation method — and that making these three elements explicit in scholarly communication will help our shared understanding.

Track Chairs