Bredemeyer Consulting

Resources for Software and Systems Architects

Architects Architecting Architecture

Software architecture is getting a lot of attention. Is it just the silver bullet du jour? We think not. It surely is critical to today's business success, yet it requires technical, business and organizational talents and skills that warrant their own path of career development, education, and research.

This site organizes a variety of resources to help enterprise architects and software architects deepen and expand their understanding of architecture and the role of the architect.

The Discipline of Architecture

What is software architecture?
How do I create an architecture?
Who is right for the architect role?
Why should we pay attention to architecture?
Where does architecture fit in development?

Upcoming Workshops

Technical Leadership:

Technical Leadership Masterclass:

Open enrollment in 2024:
- Remote: Inquire

Software Architecture:

Internal workshops and consulting. Open enrollment workshops:

System Design and Architecture Workshop
- System Design for Software Architects Workshop: Sept 22-24 and Sept 29- OOct, 2025 at 11 am - 3:30 pm Eastern Time ( 6 x 4.5 hr sessions including a 30 minute break each day) [$1500/$2000]
  Instructor: Ruth Malan

News

Ruth Malan presented on Visual Design at the DDD Belgium (remote) meetup on June 9, 2021. Slides.
Ruth Malan's slides, presented at the SEI SATURN Software Architecture Conference, 2019
Ruth Malan's slides (and notes), presented at the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference, 2019
Ruth Malan was awarded the 2017 Linda Northrop Software Architecture Award. She presented the award acceptance keynote at SATURN 2017. The slides are at Slideshare.
Ruth Malan presented at O'Reilly's Software Architecture Conference 2016, April 11-12, New York. Here are the slides to her "The Architect's Clue Bucket" talk.
Ruth Malan presented a workshop titled Parkour for architects: a requisite variety workout and a presentation titled Design Visualization: Smoke and Mirrors at the Software Architect Conference in London in October, 2015. Here are annotated slides from her talk. Also in .pdf Design Visualization: Part I and on Slideshare.

Articles

System Seeing Workbook/Journal Prompts, by Ruth Malan, 2023.
Systems and Technical Leadership, by Ruth Malan, 2022.
Decisions and Technical Leadership, by Ruth Malan, 2023.
Architecture Principles, by Ruth Malan, 2021.
Decisions Decisions, July 19, 2019
Architecture Decisions, March 9, 2019
Architecture Clues: Heuristics, Part i. SCARS, August 2018.
Architecture Clues: Heuristics, Part ii. Decisions and Change, October 2018.
Visual Agility: Why We Model, June 2018.
Exploring "The Code is the Design", January 2019.

Publications

"The Art of Change: Fractal and Emergent," by Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer, Cutter Consortium Enterprise Architecture Executive Report, Vol. 13, No. 5, 2010.
A paper on innovation and agile architecture by Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer, titled "'Getting Past "But...": Finding Opportunity and Making It Happen.' Cutter Consortium's August 2008 Enterprise Architecture Executive Report.
Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer, "Enterprise Architecture as Strategic Differentiator," Enterprise Architecture Executive Report, Cutter Consortium, June 2005.
Dana Bredemeyer and Ruth Malan, What it Takes to be a Great Enterprise Architect, Executive Report, August 2004.
This report is also useful for solution or platform architects, as well as software architects.