On the Role of Information Technology Systems Architects

Information Systems in large organizations are seldom built from scratch. They have to be built taking into account different existing aspects like customers, organization’s business, and its current Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, among others. IT architects are the professionals who take all these aspects into account when designing an information system. Despite their importance, the work of these professionals is barely understood. This research aims to fill this gap by describing a qualitative study we conducted with IT architects. We use semi-structured interviews for data collection and analyzed our data using grounded theory methods. Our results suggest that there are different IT architect roles in every company and that the activities performed by them are highly interconnected and these interconnections are fundamental for the information diffusion and collaboration in projects

Personalized architectural documentation based on stakeholders' information needs

The stakeholders of a software system are, to a greater or lesser extent, concerned about its software architecture, as an essential artifact for capturing the key design decisions of the system. The architecture is normally documented in the Software Architecture Document (SAD), which tends to be a large and complex technical description, and does not always address the information needs of every stakeholder. Individual stakeholders are interested in dierent, sometimes overlapping, subsets of the SAD and they also require varying levels of detail. As a consequence, stakeholders are aected by an information overload problem, which in practice discourages the usage of the architectural knowledge and diminishes its value for the organization. Along this line, this work presents a semi-automated approach to recommend relevant contents of a given SAD to specific stakeholder profiles. Our approach assumes that SADs are hosted in Wikis, which not only favor communication and interactions among stakeholders, but also enable us to apply User Profiling techniques to infer stakeholders´ interests with respect to particular documents. We have built a recommendation tool implementing our approach, which was tested in two experiments with Wiki-based SADs. Although preliminary, the results have shown that the recommendations of the tool help to nd the architectural documents that best match the stakeholders´ interests.Fil: Tommasel, Antonela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; ArgentinaFil: Nicoletti, Matías Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; ArgentinaFil: Diaz Pace, Jorge Andres. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; ArgentinaFil: Schiaffino, Silvia Noemi. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; ArgentinaFil: Godoy, Daniela Lis. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; Argentin

Ambidexterity in large-scale software engineering

Software is pervading our environment with products that become smarter and smarter every day. In order to follow this trend, software companies deliver continuously new features, in order to anticipate their competitors and to gain market share. For this reason, they need to adopt processes and organization solutions that allow them to deliver continuously. A key challenge for software organizations is to balance the resources in order to deliver enough new features in the short-term but also to support the delivery of new features in the long-term. In one word, companies need to be ambidextrous. In this thesis we investigate what ambidexterity is, what are the factors that hinder large software companies to be ambidextrous, and we provide initial solutions for the mitigation of such challenges. The research process consists of an empirical investigation based on the Grounded Theory approach, in which we conducted several case studies based on continuous interaction with 7 large software organizations developing embedded software. The results in this thesis are grounded in a large number of data collected, and corroborated by a combination of exploratory and confirmatory, as well as qualitative and quantitative data collection. The contributions of this thesis include a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing ambidexterity, the current challenges and a proposed solution, CAFFEA. In particular, we found that three main challenges where hampering the achievement of ambidexterity for large software companies. The first one is the conflict between Agile Software Development and software reuse. The second one is the complexity of balancing short-term and long-term goals among a large number of stakeholders with different views and expertize. The third challenge is the risky tendency, in practice, of developing systems that does not sustain long-term delivery of new features: this is caused by the unbalanced focus on short-term deliveries rather than on the system architecture quality. This phenomenon is referred to as Architectural Technical Debt, which is a financial theoretical framework that relates the implementation of suboptimal architectural solutions to taking a debt. Even though such sub-optimal solutions might bring benefits in the short-term, a debt might have an interest associated with it, which consists of a negative impact on the ability of the software company to deliver new features in the long-term. If the interest becomes too costly, then the software company suffers delays and development crises. It is therefore important to avoid accumulation, in the system, of Architectural Technical Debt with a high interest associated with it. The solution proposed in this thesis is a comprehensive framework, CAFFEA, which includes the management of Architectural Technical Debt as a spanning activity (i.e., a practice shared by stakeholders belonging to different groups inside the organization). We have recognized and evaluated the strategic information required to manage Architectural Technical Debt. Then, we have developed an organizational framework, including roles, teams and practices, which are needed by the involved stakeholders. This solutions have been empirically developed and evaluated, and companies report initial benefits of applying the results in practice

An evaluation of the challenges of Multilingualism in Data Warehouse development

In this paper we discuss Business Intelligence and define what is meant by support for Multilingualism in a Business Intelligence reporting context. We identify support for Multilingualism as a challenging issue which has implications for data warehouse design and reporting performance. Data warehouses are a core component of most Business Intelligence systems and the star schema is the approach most widely used to develop data warehouses and dimensional Data Marts. We discuss the way in which Multilingualism can be supported in the Star Schema and identify that current approaches have serious limitations which include data redundancy and data manipulation, performance and maintenance issues. We propose a new approach to enable the optimal application of multilingualism in Business Intelligence. The proposed approach was found to produce satisfactory results when used in a proof-of-concept environment. Future work will include testing the approach in an enterprise environmen