The future of software architectures for large-scalebusiness solutions: modularity, scalability, andseparation of concerns

ABSTRACT

Modern software projects are of large scale, often involving years of development, tens of thousands of days of work effort, and millions of lines of code. This complexity is aggravated by the fact that development is often distributed over several geographic locations, as dictated by cost considerations, the availability of domain specialists, legal requirements, and other factors. Despite advances in development tools and techniques, software initiatives have lagged behind in utilizing novel software engineering methods and techniques effectively to reduce the complexity of large-scale software. The results can be seen in Corporate and Government IT budgets - based on Accenture and Industry research, IT cost overruns are still commonplace, and the cost to "keep the lights on" for fragile legacy applications typically consumes up to 60% IT budgets.

Increased adoption of advanced software engineering techniques holds great promise for solving these key business challenges. For example, modularization holds a promise in reducing complexity of software design by hiding low-level implementations in well-defined units of deployment. Specifically, vendors build platforms that allow architects to design large-scale systems that can be composed out of services on the fly. For example, JBoss built a platform that allows architects to seamlessly integrate Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) with application and business-process management (BPM) in enterprise distributions. According to research with Accenture's CIO Council, at least 58% of global organizations are implementing or piloting SOA.

Proper separation of concerns is a key to effective modularization. While separation of concerns is more of art than science in the work of software architects, novel technologies that enable effective separation of concerns are gaining traction. Most recently Accenture used AOP on a government project to do audit tracking. It was very successful and the techniques are currently being incorporated in Accenture Delivery Architecture (ADA), which is a standards-based architecture used for very large scale software development. A large focus of our efforts is in making advanced software engineering techniques more "consumable" by across our network of developers - this is done through standardized architectures, reference applications, and training.

The talk will focus on progress that has been made, and challenges ahead in driving further business value through use of these types of techniques. In addition to the areas mentioned, we will focus on related issues such as: requirements traceability, automated software quality assurance, role of DSLs andMDA, and Agile techniques.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.0 GENERAL

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.0 General

General Terms:
Economics, Languages, Management

Keywords:
aop, soa