Improving Architectural Composability and Consumability using Communities: Lessons learned from Eclipse, SOA and MDA

Summary form only given. The last few years has seen a great acceleration in the convergence of two communities - the open standards community that is setting a foundation for how global, interoperable software intensive systems can be specified and the open source community which is implementing many of these standards. As the pace of software complexity continues to accelerate -we are assembling and integrating software that is produced by a global community - new challenges are driving architectural innovation. How can we design these systems with composability in mind while at the same time improving the productivity & consumability (by architects as well as users) of the systems we deliver? The move towards model driven architecture (MDA) service oriented architecture (SOA) - the `architecture word is respectable now! - and many of the open source projects at eclipse.org and apache.org that implement these specifications clearly illustrate this trend. What is missing? - A focus on `consumability': How can we use motivating scenarios from end users that drive the implementation of these standards as we continue our thirst for simplifying and managing software complexity? The talk will conclude with some late breaking information on how some of the key emerging MDA and SOA standards are converging and building a foundation for the next wave of standards & innovation in business process management