Week 5 - Master's Project - Time to Present at Drupal BadCamp 2019

For over 13 years the Bay Area Drupal Camp has gathered thousands from a worldwide community of Drupal users, developers, marketers and content specialists to share their expertise, and level up their skills. This year I decided to take the opportunity to present ADD at the developer conference. I used my Ricoh experience as a Solutions Engineer and the knowledge gained from my master’s class to put together a presentation on how ADD can work with architecting systems or systems of systems with Drupal sites.

Below is a description of my session:

Attribute Driven Design or ADD for short, uses the approach of defining a system architecture with the idea that the design process will be based by the software quality attribute requirements. ADD follows a recursive process in which the following activities are utilized: Plan, Do, and Check. In the Plan activity, software quality attributes and constraints related to design, are considered so that the correct elements are chosen to ensure the architecture can meet the requirements. In the Do, the elements are created to meet the quality attributes and function requirements of the system. Lastly in Check, the results of the design are analyzed to ensure the requirement of the system are satisfied. The process goes through a recursive process until the entire system has an architecture that meets all the requirements.

In this session we will dive into the 7 steps of Attribute-Driven Design and discuss how Drupal makes it easy for software architects to satisfy business requirements using ADD.

• Confirm there is enough requirements information
• Choose an element of the system to decompose
• Identify candidate architectural drivers
• Choose a design concept that satisfies the architectural drivers
• Instantiate architectural elements and allocate responsibilities
• Define interface for instantiated elements
• Verify and refine requirements and make them constraints for instantiated elements

My initial feedback:

I felt that the presentation went well. I found out quickly that ADD is a great tool and that people are interested in the various elements that make ADD a good choice when building architectures. I only wished I had more case studies to share as the crowd really was interested in viewing diagrams and first hand experience of the various architecture components that can be defined using ADD. I plan to dissect my presentation however I find that I have a lot on my plate as I have two courses pending in my master's program.