Economics-Driven Software Architecture

Abstract:                                                                                                                          
Dr Bahsoon's talk will highlight some of his ongoing work in the area of economics-driven architecting and technical debt management.  He will discuss challenges in evaluating large scale software architectures, where uncertainty, dynamism, heterogeneity and complex trade-offs are the norm.  He posits that the link between architectural design decisions and their economics should be explicit.  Dr Bahsoon will describe an economics-driven approach, based on the principles of Real Options for valuing the architecture design decisions.  The objective is to assist software architects in strategic "what if" analysis in the face of uncertainty.  He will give examples from cloud-based software architectures and microservices.  Dr Bahsoon will conclude by discussing some challenges and research opportunities in economics-driven architecting.                                
                                                                                                                                   
BIO:                                                                                                                               
Dr Rami Bahsoon is a Senior Lecturer (~Associate Professor) at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK.  Dr Bahsoon's research is in the area of software architecture, cloud and services software engineering, self-aware software architectures, self-adaptive and managed software engineering, economics-driven software engineering and technical debt management in software.  He co-edited four books on Software Architecture, including Economics-Driven Software Architecture; Software Architecture for Big Data and the Cloud; Aligning Enterprise, System, and Software Architecture.  During his sabbatical year in 2018, he was a Visiting Scientist at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University,  USA (June-August 2018) and was the 2018 Melbourne School of Engineering (MSE) Visiting Fellow of The School of Computing and Information Systems, the University of Melbourne (August to November 2018).  He holds a PhD in Software Engineering from University College London (2006) and was MBA Fellow in Technology at London Business School (2003-2005).  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Associate Editor of IEEE Software - Software Economies.                                                  
                                                                                                                                   
His publications can be found here:  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rzb/