SATURN, a software architecture conference

Last May, I had a great opportunity to present at SATURN conference. SATURN stands for SEI Architecture User Network and SEI stands for Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute. You might wonder what topics are discussed in a software architecture conference but I found that the discussions were very useful and it suggested applicable solutions.

This was my first attendance to the conference. Before I arrived in Portland, OR, I had not enough idea of what the conference looks like since I had checked just the overall description about the conference and its schedule. After meeting the people at SATURN 2014, it turns out that this was recognized as a very useful discussion venue for architects. This year it was comprised of SEI's courses and tutorials for 3 days and the main event for 2 days.

I happened to meet people who helped me understand what SATURN is for. In the first day's evening, there was a reception and I joined a couple of insurance company people from OH and a person who listened to my presentation from NY. The insurance people said that they were attending SATURN every year because of the following reasons: SEI presents a heavy weighted methodology which costs lots of money and time. Whatever the benefits are, we cannot guarantee that the methodologies fit every organization. However, since this conference attracts real practitioners, it is very useful in that we can learn from their real practices.

SATURN 2014 Reception - This year, it was held at Marriot Downtown Waterfront, Portland, OR.

I think that this is a great practice to keep finding and inventing another tailored methodology for each organization. When one of the best software engineering institutes, SEI published a methodology, we might think that it is the best solution and the project that follows this is done well. If the project team modified the methodology, do you think they did wrong and they did not followed the best practices? It depends... We might say that they did not applied the methodology but they might invent a better solution which can be applied to more diverse organizations and costs less. When we appreciate this kind of approach of continuously finding better ideas and think of it as a creative and valuable activity, we will have more advanced and efficient methodologies and ideas. In other words, tailoring may be considered not as an excuse for not following a methodology but as a right solution for the project because each project has its own stories. Moreover, if the team can give clear explanations on why the methodology should be modified and how much it will perform better, this is the moment when the tailoring is highly encouraged.

SATURN gathers the architects, who are commonly thought to love the plan-driven approaches but it goes beyond architecture. This year we had lots of discussions on 'Big Data', 'Cloud Service', and 'DevOps'. Some people might say that architecture is against 'Agile' but I have seen many agilers there. You will find many people who think architecture is important whatever a project is.

Voodoo Donut, which is a very famous in Portand, showed up in the reception.

Architecture is not highly thought of in Korea; therefore, we need to have many conferences like this.