I joined the 5th IEEE/IFIP Working Conference on Software Architecture in Pittsburgh. An interesting conference, with a lot of the big names in the Software Architecture field. Pittsburgh is not really exiting, but well enough for hosting the conference.
Just some things that jump into mind. In one of the Panel discussions, I think Alex Wolf took quite a provocative position: “The last fifteen years, we witnessed the golden age for software Architecture. We tend to be really negative about this field, but we have lots of achievements. All main problems have been solved, and from now on we can just roll downhill”. Quite an interesting statement for a research field that’s still in the stage of debating terminology (e.g. how do you define Software Architecture ?). Also, two interesting topics I noticed that got attention were “what is it that software architects do?” and Design decisions.