Alexandervon Zitzewitz
Alexander von Zitzewitz is founder, managing director of the company and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of project and management experience. In 1993 he founded ootec - a company focused on project services around object oriented software technology. This company was sold to the French Valtech group in March 2000 and served customers like Siemens, BMW, Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl and other well known names in German industry. From 2003 to early 2005 he was working as Director of Central Europe for the French company Xcalia S.A. Since the summer of 2008 he is living in Massachusetts. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.
Most nontrivial software systems suffer from significant levels of technical and architectural debt. This leads to exponentially increasing cost of change, which is not sustainable for a longer period of time. The single best thing you can do to counter this problem is to give some love to your architecture by carefully managing and controlling the dependencies among the different elements and components of a software system. For that purpose we will introduce a DSL (domain specific language) that can be used to describe and enforce architectural blueprints. Moreover we will make an excursion into the topic of legacy software modernization.
Most nontrivial software systems suffer from significant levels of technical and architectural debt. This leads to exponentially increasing cost of change, which is not sustainable for a longer period of time. The single best thing you can do to counter this problem is to give some love to your architecture by carefully managing and controlling the dependencies among the different elements and components of a software system. For that purpose we will introduce a DSL (domain specific language) that can be used to describe and enforce architectural blueprints. Moreover we will make an excursion into the topic of legacy software modernization.
Software metrics can be used effectively to judge the maintainability and architectural quality of a code base. Even more importantly they can be used as “canaries in a coal mine” to warn early about dangerous accumulations of architectural and technical debt.
Analyzing architecture is all about finding structural decay in applications and systems to determine whether the architecture is still satisfying the business concerns (performance, scalability, fault tolerance, availability, and so on) and also whether the architecture supporting the application functionality is still viable. This is known as “architectural vitality”. While the functionality of a system may be sound, the architecture supporting that functionality may not be. For example, performance and scalability may have been the number one concern 5 years ago, but today agility, testability, and deployability is the number one concern to support high levels of competitive advantage and time-to-market. Does the architecture support these “-ilities”? If not, the company is likely to fail in today’s highly competitive market.
Zero fluff.