Alexander von Zitzewitz

Fundamentals of Software Architecture: Designing and Analyzing Software Systems

Monday, 9:00 AM EST

A good software architecture is the foundation for any successful software system. Your architectural choices affect almost every aspect of the software you are building from maintainability to stability, scalability and cyber vulnerability. Matching software architecture patterns and styles with requirements is a difficult task that requires knowledge and experience as well as the willingness to pick the right trade-offs.
Way too often the originally intended architecture erodes during the development process making the software harder to understand, to maintain and to adapt to changing requirements. By losing architectural coherence you also lose all the other benefits coming from a good architectural foundation. This drives up cost, reduces the happiness of your development team and ultimately will also impact the users of your software negatively.

Join expert Alexander von Zitzewitz to learn the foundations of good architecture. You’ll explore the concept of architecture styles and architectural fitness functions and dive into software metrics with architectural relevance. You’ll also investigate architectural smells like cyclic dependencies and bottleneck classes along with ways to refactor to prevent quality issues.

After learning the fundamentals, you’ll do some real code analysis using a free tool called Sonargraph-Explorer. Get hands-on with basic assessment and analysis techniques as well as techniques and methods for breaking up or restructuring monolithic applications—and measure your progress every step of the way. Then we will talk about how you can enforce architectural models during development and therefore avoid the common problem of architectural erosion in the first place. At the end, we will look at techniques to break up monolithic applications into more manageable pieces.

Metrics for Software-Architects

Tuesday, 1:00 PM EST

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.

First we will introduce some key metrics that every architect should know (e.g., average component dependency, propagation cost, structural debt index, and more). Then we talks about the journey to create a metric to measure maintainability and introduces a new metric maintainability level. This metric is promising because its value usually matches quite well the gut feeling of developers about the maintainability of their software systems. Also covered is the use of free and commercial tools to gather metrics and follow their trends in an automated way.