More on the team

At IBM's Zurich Research Lab (ZRL), Olaf Zimmermann’s current focus is on meet-in-the-middle service modeling techniques and the architectural decisions required during SOA and Web services construction: “In this work, we investigate whether reusable architectural decision models can serve as a design technique supporting the service realization activities. Currently, architectural decisions typically are captured ad hoc on each and every project. This is a labor-intensive undertaking without immediate benefits. SOA is based on common architectural patterns such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and service composition; therefore many of the required architectural decisions recur on multiple projects. This observation led us to create a reusable SOA decision model that can guide the design work, rather than just capturing the results of the design work, and can also facilitate cross-project experience exchange.”

Prior to his present research assignment, Olaf has been lending his expertise as an Open Group Master Certified IT Architect and IBM Executive IT Architect to IBM Global Business Services (GBS) clients in telecommunications, financial services and other industries. Since 2001, Olaf has applied SOA concepts and Web services technologies on a number of enterprise application development and integration projects to help his clients design and implement high quality services. His research efforts are motivated by this extensive project experience: “We took a well-established concept, architectural decisions, from one context, software documentation, to another, software design. We give decisions priority in our design technique, an approach that appeals both to project managers and executives, as well as IT staff. It is very important to them to make the right managerial and technical design decisions, which makes it rather surprising that so few existing software engineering methods and tools support this concept,” says Olaf.

To assist in creating applications, Olaf and his team have developed what he calls an “Architectural Decision Knowledge Wiki.” He describes it as “a wiki supported by a layered application and a relational database, as opposed to Eclipse plugins or a traditional wiki. Unlike traditional wikis, our application wiki is driven by a domain and database model specifically designed for the wants and needs of our target audience: solution architects on design, development, and integration projects. The application wiki gives technical decision makers on software development projects much better opportunities for collaboration and knowledge exchange than other tools. Our approach is inspired by trends such as Web-centric collaborative research and engineering, for instance in support of offshoring and outsourcing strategies. It comes with lessons learned and best practices originating from my own projects, as well as content donated by fellow IT architects.”

In his current role, Olaf especially appreciates the opportunity he has to blend his two areas of interest: architectural decision modeling and SOA and Web services design. “Both areas have immediate practical relevance, but are also very interesting from a software engineering research standpoint. At IBM Research we have the chance to contribute in many ways – via conference papers and lectures, via the alphaWorks emerging technology program, and via joint projects with other lines of business. In the current project, I have the unique opportunity to reflect on what I learned and applied in practice, generalize and abstract it into methods and techniques that are universally applicable for all software architects. The first results are promising, as evidenced in our recent SOA and eFactory solution for a mid-size European mobile telco.”