Talk: Hugo Sereno Ferreira
Incomplete by Design — Thoughts on Agile Architectures
Hugo Sereno Ferreira, FEUP-DEI
Saturday, Jun 26, 15:35 – 17:05 @ B 002
Despite several advances in software engineering, today’s developers still face recurrent problems in acquiring, inferring, capturing and formalizing requirements, particularly with systems where the process is highly-coupled with the stakeholders’ perspective and the requirements often change faster than the implementation.
Traditionally, once the analysis phase is finished and the implementation progresses, a strong resistance against further changes emerge, due to the mismatch between specification and implementation artifacts. Nonetheless, some domains do rely on constant adaptation of their processes to an evolving reality, since knowledge being continuously acquired lead to new insights of their own business and what support they expect from software.
Confronted with the above issues, Agile methodologies have intensified their focus on a highly iterative and incremental approach, accepting that change is, in fact, an invariant of software development. This blurs the line between designing and developing, specifying and implementing, and should we wish to harness continual change, that distinction no longer suits our purposes: design should become both the medium and outcome of action. Consequently, we are thus looking forward not just for a process to be effective and agile, but to what form should agile software take.
