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Friday, May 29, 2009

Interviews with Volvo EESE managers

I got a link to a web clip with an interview with my manager Hans Alminger on automotive software modelling from the Electronica Automotive Conference 2008. A bit late, but anyway...

A very recent interview with Hans' (and therefore also my) boss Lennart Lundh can be read in the latest issue of Automotive Engineer on integrating functionality in fewer and bigger ECUs. It does not get hotter of the presses than this...

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Student Presentation on Software Architecture

This post is the next episode in the series of "Software Architecture Basics".

I found the following presentation made by some of the students of the Software Engineering & Management at the IT University. I'm impressed that they managed to boil down almost a full course to a single presentation with a rather light touch (yes, there are some technical details that could be discussed, but nevertheless).
I wish I could take credit for being their teacher, but I only gave a single lecture in their architecture course.

Software Architecture Presentation

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The architecture of Lego

Some years ago I was asked to explain the concept of a product line architecture for some students that had not heard of the concept before. They were not very familiar with terminology used in the field of software architecture either so I had to do it on a basic level.

I decided to use an example outside of the software domain, namely the Danish toy system of Lego, since everybody in Sweden played with Lego as a kid. I guess the example looses it's pedagogical value if the audience has not seen Lego.

I did some revere engineering to identify architectural strategies and quality attributes. Pictures in the presentation are stolen from unknown internet sites...

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

More news and press releases

Here are some interesting news and press releases:

I finish with a quote to keep in mind when designing architectures:

"Warum soll man es einfach machen, wenn man es so schön komplizieren kann?"

which roughly translates to

"Why should we make it simple when it can be made so beautifully complicated?"

I don't know where it originally comes from though...

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Survey of active vehicle dynamics systems

Prodrive is a company known for supplying advanced technology to a number of "special" vehicles such as the Ford Focus RS and the Subaru Impreza P1.
But the reason I mention them on this blog is that they have written a nice SAE paper surveying different electronic vehicle dynamics systems available when designing a vehicle, and therefore the electrical architecture in a premium vehicle may need to address.
It is possible to download a free copy of the paper at the Prodrive website.

References in paper about the Architecture Business Cycle

I submitted a paper called "A Case Study of the Architecture Business Cycle for an In-Vehicle Software Architecture". I cannot publish the paper in this blog (at least not until it has been accepted), but I can give the reference list. Many of the papers can be found on-line through Google Scholar if access is not available through the commercial portals.

AUTOSAR, 2009. AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR). Available at: http://www.autosar.org.

Bachmann, F. & Bass, L., 2001. Managing variability in software architectures. SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 26(3), 126-132.

Bass, L., Clements, P. & Kazman, R., 2003. Software Architecture in Practice 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley.

Berg, B.L., 2006. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences 6th ed., Allyn & Bacon.

Broy, M., 2006. Challenges in automotive software engineering. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering. Shanghai, China: ACM, pp. 33-42. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1134285.1134292 [Accessed December 18, 2008].

Conway, M.E., 1968. How Do Committees Invent? Datamation. Available at: http://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html.

IEEE, 2000. Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems. Available at: http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/std_public/description/se/1471-2000_desc.html.

ISO - International Organization for Standardization, 2003. ISO standard 11898: Controller Area Network (CAN). Available at: http://www.iso.org/ [Accessed December 28, 2008].

Kazman, R. & Bass, L., 2005. Categorizing Business Goals for Software Architectures, Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. Available at: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/pub/documents/05.reports/pdf/05tr021.pdf.

Kazman, R. et al., 2005. The Architecture Business Cycle Revisited: A Business Goals Taxonomy to Support Architecture Design and Analysis. news@SEI. Available at: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/news-at-sei/columns/the_architect/2005/2/architect-2005-2.htm [Accessed December 18, 2008].

LIN Consortium, 2008. Local Interconnect Network (LIN). Available at: http://www.lin-subbus.org/ [Accessed December 28, 2008].

McDermid, J.A., 2000. Complexity: Concept, Causes and Control. In Proceedings. Sixth IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, ICECCS. p. 2Â–9. Available at: ftp://ftp.cs.york.ac.uk/pub/hise/Complexity-Concept,Causes & Control.pdf.

Melin, K., 1998. Volvo S80: Electrical system of the future. Volvo Technology Report, 1, 3-7.

MOST Cooperation, 2008. Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST). Available at: http://www.mostcooperation.com/ [Accessed December 28, 2008].

Noergaard, T., 2005. Embedded Systems Architecture: A Comprehensive Guide for Engineers and Programmers, Newnes.

Pretschner, A. et al., 2007. Software Engineering for Automotive Systems: A Roadmap. In 2007 Future of Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, pp. 55-71. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1253532.1254710 [Accessed December 28, 2008].

Reichart, G. & Haneberg, M., 2004. Key Drivers for a Future System Architecture in Vehicles. In Proc. Convergence 2004. Detroit, MI, USA: SAE. Available at: http://www.sae.org/technical/papers/2004-21-0025 [Accessed March 9, 2009].

Smallbone Tizard, D., Wallmark, J. & Warrby, T., 2007. Architecture and Change: A Case Study Using the Architecture Business Cycle for Assessing an Organisation Facing a Major Architectural Change, Göteborg, Sweden: IT University of Göteborg.

Walsham, G., 1995. Interpretive case studies in IS research: nature and method. European Journal of Information Systems , 4, 74-81.

Yin, R.K., 2003. Case Study Research: Design and Methods 3rd ed., Sage Publications.

Unconscious Competence

I have in the last year or so found it difficult to immediately explain why I perceive a certain system design is flawed (at least from an architectural viewpoint), while my gut feeling strongly tells me it is. It seems I'm most sensible to conceptual integrity, or rather lack thereof.
Usually I can do a some logical reasoning to support my initial conclusion, but it seems backwards that I reach the conclusion first and find the arguments to support it afterwards.
I stumbled upon the concept of code smell, and from there upon unconscious competence, which pretty much sums my experience. I had never heard of unconscious competence before, but I'm relieved that others have recognised it as a "level of competence".

Now it could just be that I am totally delusional about architecture, and is actually unconsciously incompetent instead. It seems nobody outside programmers recognise that you could be unconsciously competent in such a highly cognitive area...

Note: I wasn't finding the definitions in wikipedia, but here, but I thought the wikipedia definitions were more understandable. A google search found these pages on the subject as well (I filtered all pages by personnel development companies and about athletic coaching):