Puzzling

Slow week blog-wise but a lot of activity going on. Besides putting all the pieces of the puzzle together before diving into my new assignment I’ve managed to cram in some work on both xtUML and agile architecture.


So here I am listening to Seven Nation Army and writing an RUP-inspired explanation to how architecture and “agile” can connect. As a piece of this process a comparison of Lean and agile make sense… however when reading articles around the web things makes less and less sense… seems as the parties on either side of the imaginary fence try to advocate the opposite’s similarities where beneficial…

Or agile is the wrong word, the current focus in mind is Scrum.

An interesting observation is that the architecture mindset that I have fit quite well with Lean philosophies but when discussing it in terms of Scrum it is hard not to make patches and adaptations to the frame-work…

Architecture for Lean and agile organizations

Yesterday I was in Gothenburg for a very long but productive meeting together with Peter^2. We started out time-boxing our day with the clear goal to get something useful down on paper. The focus was on Lean and agile (or actually just Scrum and not everything “agile”) and in what direction we would like to see architecture go. At the end of the day I think we have something good cooking now and the rest is pure make-up (well almost). It's about time I would say since we have discussed this for so long now.


It would be fun if we could get some “oomf” into the paper so we could send it to e.g ECSA 2010 (hence no details of what we actually talked about here).

We’ll see, anyway days like yesterday are one very good reason why KIT TM is a good place to be at. Thanks Peter & Peter.

Kanban myself

We've started to use a Kanban-board at the office... we'll see where it takes us. The fuzzy picture is quite intentional... maybe there are secrets on the board, who knows?

Modprod 2010

So Modprod 2010 has come to an end and as last year I enjoyed the conference. Besides the obvious networking, highlights for me were the Requirements Modeling session with Kristian and the keynote by Hilding on Modellica for embedded systems. With regards to “our” performance I’ve only heard positive feeback on Gunilla’s tutorial “MBSE in a Lean context” and I think my 20-minute talk on Information Platforms was ok but next time I will put more emphasis on “what” rather than “why”.
During Kristian’s session we had a discussion around the difference between abstraction and design… arguably sometimes obvious but still he drew a quick example serving as a good mental reminder.

Regardless how obvious it is what’s abstraction and what’s design above I think mistakes are common in practice.

Modprod Day 1

... is coming to an end.

Interesting day and the tutorial on requirements modeling was a positive suprise... might come back to some details when I'm back on Thursday.

http://www.modprod.liu.se/

Lean experience

Our seminary-series Lean Experience is now announced, head over to our homepage for more information and registration.

http://www.knowit.se/lean

Lean some more...

... if you want to know more about system architecture at Scania you can also visit IBC Euroforum in April where Staffan is one of the speakers...

Lean Software/System Architecture

Softhouse publish a neat little mag called Lean Magazine. In their most recent addition Staffan Persson from Scania describes how they apply architecture in a Lean culture. I’ve couldn’t agree more to Staffan’s words and I’ve tried in recent assignments to gently push towards this philosophy… in this respect I think Scania, from what I’ve seen in my assignments there, currently is the beacon in the sometimes hazy embedded industry in Sweden. Scania represents a very clear step away from the Tayloristic approach which definitely is appealing.

A perspective from games

Found this blog post quite interesting because of the immediate visual perspective it gives. Sometimes one tends to forget just how rapid the development over the last decades has been and that’s not only in terms of computer games.


Additionally the irony in calling the first Wolfenstein game 3D is simply brilliant.

Diverse patterns

Yesterday was spent with two colleagues from our Gothenburg office at SAAB here in Linköping. Together with SAAB we at Know IT are one of the partners in a Vinnova project focused on electrical architecture (more information about our Vinnova commitments will be posted on our homepage in due time). It was a very interesting day with a lot of discussions around functional system safety and patterns. I think above all what struck me was the very competent first impression the two SAAB-employees made, they really knew their way around the block with regards to embedded development and safety. Inspiring!

Yesterday's patterns concerned safety; today the patterns are focused on separation of concern. I’m trying to compile a few but meaningful slides about MDA in order to help a co-worker. MDA for me is more than just transforming models to code; I tend to give the word a somewhat bigger scope than that. For me MDA, done correctly, can be used to bring leverage not only to the product itself but also how you build your organization. Of course if you are a software company MDA can facilitate HW-independent development and re-usable code generation but from my perspective you don’t have to have a programming department in order to gain benefits from an MDA sense of mind.

The basic MDA pattern. The x can be both S and I depending on amount of layers.

[P:Platform, M:Model, S: Specific, I:Independent]