TopCoder will be onsite at the 2008 Dr Dobb’s Architecture & Design World in Chicago July 21-24 to host the Software Architecture Contest, providing attendees with a TopCoder challenge in architectural design. The Software Architecture Contest will provide attendees with a real-world exercise in architectural design, facing off on an even playing field with their peers to determine who can create and document the best comprehensive software solution to address a set of system requirements. 

Contestants will compete to create and document a comprehensive solution to a set of system requirements. During the conference, attendees will be able to browse and score the submissions using the same scorecards and criteria that TopCoder uses to judge competitions for our own commercial projects.  [CONTINUED]

Many TopCoder clients are, or soon will be, implementing an SOA-based development model. Service Component Architecture (SCA) is receiving growing attention as the use of diverse, heterogeneous components occurs increasingly throughout the modern enterprise. 

Service Component Architect is one of two main projects ongoing at Open Service Oriented Architecture (www.osoa.org). The project was originally created by a group of vendors including IBM, BEA, Oracle, Cape Clear, Red Hat, IONA and many more and is now managed by OSOA.  SCA’s goal is to provide a model for developing and deploying components agnostic to technology, which allows for portability of code and designer and developer resources. SCA is broken up into Components, Composites and Domains. It further encapsulates and externalizes how components are connected within a domain. [CONTINUED]

When a TopCoder architecture competition completes the submission phase, and all the competitors have submitted, the competition enters the review phase. The architecture scorecard is used to determine a winner. The scorecard is used to evaluate numerous facets of an architecture, including core requirements, use of proper technologies, proper scoping and design of individual components, impact on existing systems, and overall quality of the documentation. There are also pieces of the scorecard that address database schemas, testing, and quality of the submitter-provided prototype, which only apply to certain architectures, since the scored items aren’t required for all competitions. [CONTINUED]

Check out an example of the Architecture Scorecard here.

Since implementing assembly competitions, the overall percentage of component-based architecture code has grown to 85% of the overall application (brown boxes) from 77% (white boxes), resulting in shorter development timeframes and higher quality applications.