Presentation on lean product development

I got a link from a colleague with a presentation on Lean development at Jaguar and Land Rover by Baback Yazdani. The interesting part starts after 14 minutes.

See the presentation, it is one of the best I've heard that focuses on lean product development (instead of lean manufacturing), and acknowldges the fact that not all value created by PD can be measured in money (for example the ability to do rapid development is a product of doing development). He also states that the critical issue of lean in PD is about reducing lead time.

One of the key things I think everybody should remember from the presentation is that you should not (cannot) utilise a development organisation more than 70-80% if you want to go lean. If you do that there will not be enough "thinking time" to identify potential improvements.

Presentation on the Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture & European Conference on Software Architecture

Here are the slides I used at my presentation at the Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture & European Conference on Software Architecture in Cambridge 2009.

The presentation went well, but the questions showed that the audience was more interested in how the organisation perceived the role of it's own software architecture rather than the methodology and scientific conclusions. And the role of architecture was one thing that was not possible to generalise to other organisations...

Paper accepted

Yes!!!

Dear Ulrik and Carl,

We are pleased to inform you that your research paper,

"A Case Study of the Architecture Business Cycle for an In-Vehicle Software Architecture",

has been accepted for inclusion in the program of the Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture & European Conference on Software Architecture 2009 (WICSA/ECSA 2009), which will be held on September 14-17 in Cambridge, UK.

As with previous WICSA & ECSA conferences, we anticipate a lively gathering, drawing both academics and practitioners, and featuring paper presentations, keynotes, working group sessions, tutorials, and workshops.

Of the initial 112 submissions (of which 84 research papers), the program committee accepted 23 high-quality research papers. Congratulations on being included in this select group.

In preparing your paper for publication in the IEEE conference proceedings please keep in mind the following:
1. In order for us to include the paper in the proceedings, at least one of the authors must register for and attend the conference. If this is going to be impossible please let us know as soon as possible so we can adjust the conference program.
2. To the extent possible, your final version of the paper should reflect the reviewers' comments and suggestions for improvement.
3. The paper must be formatted according to IEEE proceedings guidelines and the final length is strictly limited to 10 printed pages. Further details may be found in the "Submission of Camera-ready Copy" section of the WICSA/ECSA 2009 web site at http://www.wicsa.net.
4. To accommodate publication schedules, final camera-ready copies must be submitted by June 30, 2009.

Once again, congratulations on having your paper accepted. We look forward to receiving your final revised paper, and to seeing you in September in Cambridge, UK.

Yours sincerely,

Flavio Oquendo, Eltjo Poort, Judith Stafford
Program Chairs, IEEE/IFIP WICSA/ECSA 2009

The paper has the following abstract

A Case Study of the Architecture Business Cycle
for an In-Vehicle Software Architecture
This paper presents the theoretical and practical benefits
from a case study using Architecture Business Cycle to
understand the management of software architecture at an
automotive manufacturer. The study was done to prepare for
architectural changes driven by new technology and in the
automotive business environment.
Our results show that the architecture business cycle
worked well in defining the theoretical context for the study
after some modifications; the architecture had to be precisely
defined in the interview situation to gain more useful data
rather than broad generalisations. Further contributions
of the study were a deeper understanding of role of the
architecture and it’s position among other artefacts in the
organisation, and an increased focus on architectural issues
in management meetings. The study also indirectly affected
a subsequent re-organisation.

References in paper about the Architecture Business Cycle

I submitted a paper called "A Case Study of the Architecture Business Cycle for an In-Vehicle Software Architecture". I cannot publish the paper in this blog (at least not until it has been accepted), but I can give the reference list. Many of the papers can be found on-line through Google Scholar if access is not available through the commercial portals.

AUTOSAR, 2009. AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR). Available at: http://www.autosar.org.

Bachmann, F. & Bass, L., 2001. Managing variability in software architectures. SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 26(3), 126-132.

Bass, L., Clements, P. & Kazman, R., 2003. Software Architecture in Practice 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley.

Berg, B.L., 2006. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences 6th ed., Allyn & Bacon.

Broy, M., 2006. Challenges in automotive software engineering. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering. Shanghai, China: ACM, pp. 33-42. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1134285.1134292 [Accessed December 18, 2008].

Conway, M.E., 1968. How Do Committees Invent? Datamation. Available at: http://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html.

IEEE, 2000. Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems. Available at: http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/std_public/description/se/1471-2000_desc.html.

ISO - International Organization for Standardization, 2003. ISO standard 11898: Controller Area Network (CAN). Available at: http://www.iso.org/ [Accessed December 28, 2008].

Kazman, R. & Bass, L., 2005. Categorizing Business Goals for Software Architectures, Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. Available at: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/pub/documents/05.reports/pdf/05tr021.pdf.

Kazman, R. et al., 2005. The Architecture Business Cycle Revisited: A Business Goals Taxonomy to Support Architecture Design and Analysis. news@SEI. Available at: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/news-at-sei/columns/the_architect/2005/2/architect-2005-2.htm [Accessed December 18, 2008].

LIN Consortium, 2008. Local Interconnect Network (LIN). Available at: http://www.lin-subbus.org/ [Accessed December 28, 2008].

McDermid, J.A., 2000. Complexity: Concept, Causes and Control. In Proceedings. Sixth IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, ICECCS. p. 2–9. Available at: ftp://ftp.cs.york.ac.uk/pub/hise/Complexity-Concept,Causes & Control.pdf.

Melin, K., 1998. Volvo S80: Electrical system of the future. Volvo Technology Report, 1, 3-7.

MOST Cooperation, 2008. Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST). Available at: http://www.mostcooperation.com/ [Accessed December 28, 2008].

Noergaard, T., 2005. Embedded Systems Architecture: A Comprehensive Guide for Engineers and Programmers, Newnes.

Pretschner, A. et al., 2007. Software Engineering for Automotive Systems: A Roadmap. In 2007 Future of Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, pp. 55-71. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1253532.1254710 [Accessed December 28, 2008].

Reichart, G. & Haneberg, M., 2004. Key Drivers for a Future System Architecture in Vehicles. In Proc. Convergence 2004. Detroit, MI, USA: SAE. Available at: http://www.sae.org/technical/papers/2004-21-0025 [Accessed March 9, 2009].

Smallbone Tizard, D., Wallmark, J. & Warrby, T., 2007. Architecture and Change: A Case Study Using the Architecture Business Cycle for Assessing an Organisation Facing a Major Architectural Change, Göteborg, Sweden: IT University of Göteborg.

Walsham, G., 1995. Interpretive case studies in IS research: nature and method. European Journal of Information Systems , 4, 74-81.

Yin, R.K., 2003. Case Study Research: Design and Methods 3rd ed., Sage Publications.

Case study of the Architecture Business Cycle

I'm writing a paper with the working title "A Case Study of the Architecture Business Cycle for a Vehicle Software Architecture" together with a co-author.
We have tried to identify how the Architecture Business Cycle (ABC) looks like for the software architecture in a modern vehicle with software deployed to 30-70 electronic control units (ECUs) connected by a number of multiplexed buses, such as CAN, MOST and LIN.

The main results we present are the benefits the Electronic & Electric Systems Engineering (EESE) department at Volvo Car Corporation has gained from participating in identifying the ABC. Of course there are some benefits also from a research viewpoint as well, for example how well we thought the ABC model worked for such a case study.
The data comes from in-depth interviews performed with 20 persons working at the EESE department.