As I continue my work on my little nook of Microsoft's S+S business strategy, the team I work with has noticed something peculiar about what exactly a Service Offering really is. Because we know the packaged software business so well, we sometimes overlook what at first seems like a subtle difference...

Months ago I published a blog about how to implement system quality attributes ( found here ). In that article I asserted that Solution Architects should deliberately design systems for high quality and I provided a means for doing this. Because the point of software, or so I assert, is to automate business...

I recently participated in an IASA initiative to document skills needed by Software Architects. I wrote an article on Implementing System Quality Attributes - see below. Here's the location of the article on IASA: http://www.iasahome.org/c/portal/layout?p_l_id=PUB.1.269&p_p_id=20&p_p_action...

Another idea to improve system quality … I’ve contributed to the delivery of several enterprise systems where many were delivered successfully and many were serious failures (and a whole lot that were challenged). By failed I mean that two or more of the following was true: not on-time, not on-budget...

I wanted to follow up a note I mentioned in a previous blog I wrote on how to Manage System Quality and talk about System Design Process as it relates to managing system quality. I’ve come across several methodologies that include system design processes like Rational Unified Process, Prince2, Method1...

There are several things that architects do when building and delivering solutions but one of the core responsibilities often seems to get lost early in the project lifecycle - ensuring system quality. For this reason, I thought it'd be interesting to talk about how this should be done to bring system...

First of all, let’s level set on the definition of system Flexibility. I quite like M. Barbacci’s definition which is “ Flexibility is the ease with which a system or component can be modified for use in applications or environments other than those for which it was specifically designed.” The beauty...