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.
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.
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.