How can we prove that our systems actually follow the architectures they are supposed to?

Elliot Chikofsky is a Vice Chair of Technology and Conferences for the IEEE Computer Society, chairing its Technical Activities Committee. He has advised on IT investment and portfolio management, reengineering, enterprise architecture, and systems management for many corporations and industrial enterprises. Well-known for his work on reengineering, reverse engineering, software tools, and CASE environments and repositories, he chairs the Reengineering Forum industry association and teaches commercial IT portfolio management seminars across Canada for Intervista Institute. He also teaches information technology, business management, and engineering technology at both Northeastern University in Boston and the University of Phoenix.

Chikofsky will give the guest lecture "Making Architecture Compliance Practical" this Thursday, February 9, 2012, 11am - 12pm in ECS 660.

Architecture compliance is difficult to assert with confidence, hard to prove convincingly, and too easy to disavow. Through the use of the Architecture Compliance and Requirements Traceability (ACART) process, we have learned a lot about the nature of architecture conformance and how government agencies and their contractors can assert and demonstrate compliance in a practical and cost-effective way. The methods that have emerged apply to many kinds of architecture-based requirements for systems, including the U.S. DoD's  Business Enterprise Architecture (BEA).