Grady is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments. A renowned visionary, he has devoted his life's work to improving the art and the science of software development. Grady served as Chief Scientist of Rational Software Corp. since its founding in 1981 and through its acquisition by IBM in 2003.

He now is part of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center serving as Chief Scientist for Software Engineering, where he continues his work on the Handbook of Software Architecture but also leads various software engineering projects that are beyond the constraints of immediate product horizons. Grady continues to engage with real customers working on very real problems and is working to build deep relationships with academia and other research organizations around the world.

Grady is one of the original authors of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and was also one of the original developers of several of Rational's products. Grady has served as architect and architectural mentor for numerous complex software-intensive systems around the world in just about every domain imaginable.

Dr. Will Tracz is a Lockheed Martin Fellow and principal software engineer/application architect for the Global Combat Support System - AF (GCSS-AF) Application Integration department at Lockheed Martin IS&S in Endicott, NY responsible for investigating innovative applications of and evaluating technology for the GCSS-AF Architecture Integration Framework. Dr. Tracz is the co-chair of Lockheed Martin's Corporate Advanced Software Technology Focus Group. In addition, he was a co-PI on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Dynamic Assembly of Systems for Adaptability, Dependability, and Assurance (DASADA) and Domain-Specific Software Architecture (DSSA) Programs.

Dr. Tracz is a member of the RIT Software Engineering Advisory Board, the Software Engineering Institute Technical Advisory Group on Engineering and Method, and an IEEE TCSE Executive Committee Member at Large. In addition, he is the editor of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, past chairman of the International Conference on Software Engineering sponsored by IEEE and ACM, and the author of over 100 technical reports and books on software engineering, software architectures, and software reuse.

Every software-intensive system has an architecture; most are accidental, only a few are intentional, having been forged from the tens of thousands of small decisions made daily by all the stakeholders of a project. Although the code is the ultimate truth, it's not the whole truth, and as a result, an incredible amount of design information is kept in tribal memory.

For legacy systems - which is essentially the state of every economically viable software-intensive system - this raises problems of transformation: How does one continue to innovate, absorb new requirements and technology, and improve quality in a large body of operational code? For new systems - from where considerable innovation often comes - this raises issues of what the "best" architecture is.

In this presentation, we'll examine the state of the practice in software architeture, examining topics such as software architecture representation, patterns, process, and governance.