Where am I?

Instead of teaching PAFSD this week I'm at the SPA2005 conference in St Neots and you are all hopefully using the time to get ahead in your coursework.

I've been to 3 session today: Architectural Failures, Lightning Writing Workshop and Creativity the Path to Innovative Requirements.

Architectural Failures was a short session run by Michael Platt, a Microsoft Architectural Evangelist and a member of the CSSE/ISCA Industrial Advisory Group. Mike talked about a number of projects he has seen where the architecture had proved problematic and discussed why this had occured and how it could have been avoided. One or two others also outlined projects they had been involved with where the architecture had failed. In small groups we then listed on post-its architectural problems we seen and tried to draw out why the problems had occured. These were then combined into a shared list which Mike will put on his blog at:
http://blogs.technet.com/michael_platt/default.aspx

The list of failures seen as the result of architectural failure included: non-delivery, inadequate system response times/performance, unreliability, problems with maintainability, organic or creeping death, ungraceful degradation/failing confusingly (sometimes symptoms seem to be network problems).

The causes of architectural failure included: over-engineering (e.g. including all possible future situations), not understanding the problem domain, naive design, many-to-many relationships not being resolved into one-to-many relationships, badly captured requirements and/or boundary conditions, coupling, lack of the right tool for the job, lack of encapsulation, poor adaptability.

Overall the session went well with good input from the participants, Mike was pleased as he doesn't usually do these sessions interactively and I was relieved as his shepherd that it went well. The only drawback seemed to be that it could have been longer and Mike couldn't follow up with a BoF session as he had to leave soon afterwards to fly to Edinburgh for a Technet Roadshow.

The second session I went to was Laurent Bossavit's Lightning Writing Workshop. This looked at techniques to help with writing - the participants included published authors, writing authors, academics, a composer, someone struggling with writing a dissertaion and people wanting to improve their techical writing. We shared ideas and feelings on writing, Laurent got us to write continuously for 10 minutes (even if we just wrote 'I don't know what to write') and then reflect on the process. He then had us write continuously for 5 minutes either a dialogue or a letter and discuss and differences in how the experience felt. Finally he has suggested some reading and given us a list of writing tips. His Blog at: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/ looks like it would be a good read and I think he intends putting something on about writing.

This afternoon's session Creativity, the Path to Innovative Requirements was based on Suzanne Robertson's experience of running creativity workshops for a number of companies. She introduced us to a range of techniques and had us try them out in groups - our task being to find ways of having a personal plane. Firstly we had to brainstorm constraints, then look for solutions. To help us think of solutions Suzanne introduced an analogy - bicyle couriers. Rob Day played an excellent courier with a bicycle which included a cloaking device to make it look old and unstealable, a trusty (rusty) toolbox on the back, dubious looking parcels and a very memorable uniform. We then used the information from the bicycle courier to help us look for ways of improving our personal plane problems. More details from http://www.systemsguild.com/

Lectures 5 and 6

Lecture 5 (just before Easter) looked at the Decorator, Iterator, Composite and Command patterns.

Lecture 6 (just after Easter) looked at a number of pattern catalogues both in book format and on the web. Details of many of these are on the unit web page either in the booklist section or in the Week 6 section.

A number of students have decided to do blogs as part of their portfolio and asked for examples of other student blogs. These are the ones I've managed to find:

Blog from Simon Walton a student on the EELIP MSc unit - it includes links to other students' blogs.

A tour of how Warwick Blogs work and a link to their blog directory - this includes personal blogs as well as unit related blogs.

I'm currently reading "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman published by Basic Books in 2002, ISBN 0465067107. This talks about how to design usability into (physical) objects in such a way that they are of high quality and just right for use - a concept very similar to Alexander's requirement for "QWAN" in and through patterns. Norman also has an interesting discussion of 'affordances' ie what it is something does best eg a chair has the affordance of being sat on but could also be used for standing on (for which it doesn't offer an affordance). This links well to the idea of using software to do the things it is best at ie offers affordances in.