Star Trek 2.0

I really love Star Trek. In my childhood I enjoyed the original series with Spock, Captain Kirk and Scotty. And of course, I kept watching all episodes of later series such as Star Trek - The Next Generation. To be honest, it was SciFi such as Star Trek that motivated me to become a computer expert - although I also considered physics as a possible alternative. I can even remember that I once developed my own Star Trek game on my Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 computer. The computer offered a Z80 CPU and 16k RAM memory with a built in ROM-based Basic interpreter. When I bought it in the only computer shop in Munich (back in the early eighties!), a staff member seriously asked me why I needed such an incredible large amount of memory. After several days I had designed my own Star Trek game and had typed in all the 16k of code reaching the limits of my TRS-80. This had been such a pleasant but also very exhausting activity. For some recreation I decided to go playing soccer with some of my friends. When I returned back to home, I went into my room and had a shocking experience - the computer had lost power. It turned out that my mother assumed I had forgotten to turn the computer off, and pulled the power plug. All of the code had vanished into the vast darkness of cyberspace. The only thing left was the design documentation. Yet another hint why you should value your architecture and, of course, why backups are so important.

Star Trek has always been so inspiring in terms of science and engineering that even books were written dealing with the Star Trek Universe. Think of Beaming, Warp speed, or Holodecks! Famous scientists are still discussing what could be possible and what won't be possible in the future. Suppose, you're a software engineer in the 22nd century responsible to design software for space ships and star bases. How will the engineering process look like? Which technologies and tools will be available? Unfortunately, SciFi movies do not offer any clues. They never show the neon babies (also known as software engineers), but only their products. For instance, a holodeck requires some sophisticated software systems. Obviously, most SciFi authors consider the life of a software engineer rather boring. Do you have any idea why this is the case?

Nothing is more difficult to forecast than the future. Unfortunately, my crystal ball is currently not usable due to a graphics card failure. Maybe, we should therefore try the opposite approach instead. What if the 22nd century software engineers would have to use all our current technologies. Suppose, Captain Kirk needs to communicate with the earth-based command center. Will he use Instant Messaging or maybe a Web X.0 user interface for this purpose encountering some 404s from time to time? Will everything abide to service-oriented principles? Maybe, the reason that we call it Enterprise Service Bus is related to the fact that within the Enterprise starship all communication will take place via an ESB. Another question arising here is whether companies such as Microsoft or IBM will still be around in the twentysecond century, eventually providing specialized versions of Linux or Windows to starship construction plants. If Mr. Spock needs to look up some scientific information in the databases, will he leverage Google Search and Oracle for that purpose? Does Scotty require to use a future version of Word or Excel for writing his logs? Will the weapon control system be provided by Electronic Arts? Will Mr. Sulu use Google Maps and Google Galaxy to navigate through space and time? What happens if an alien lifeform intends to take over control of a starship? Will they send a virus or trojan or maybe a root kit that can adapt itself to whatever system architecture is available? Maybe, they'll try phishing attacks intercepting HTTP packets that travel through the galaxy. Of course, they will leverage future versions of Ruby, Java, or C# for that purpose.

I guess, we all agree that these scenarios do not appear to be very likely. Of course, the future will provide much more advanced technologies and technologies that we can dream of today [if mankind survives]. Just remember the state of science and technology in the beginning of the twentieth century and compare it with our current accomplishments. Nonetheless, I wholeheartedly believe that at least some software architecture principles will remain the same in the future. For example, as we all know, patterns represent proven solutions for recurring problems. Thus, they capture experience and knowledge which can then be re-used across different software engineers. I bet, that future engineers such as Scotty or Mr. Spock will still leverage patterns instead of constantly reinventing the wheel. Domain Driven Design and Model-Driven Software Development are going to become substantial parts of software development projects. Instead of handcrafting each bit in a time-consuming way, engineers will specify their software in a domain-specific language from which advanced generators will produce sophisticated programs. And I am also pretty sure that the Enterprise crew won't apply a waterfall approach when they need to come up with a new solution. The future is agile! In one of my previous postings I already could prove that the success of the Borgs is primarily related to their agile processes. Future software engineers will still have to face the challenges of operational and developmental requirements. Maybe, a smart software engineer can come up with some sophisticated concepts how to inject such properties into a concrete software architecture.

In summary, software architecture will still be one of the essential topics in the 22nd century. Therefore, we can finally draw the conclusion that being a software architect will remain an important profession. It means to boldly go where no one has gone before. It also means according to Douglas Adams' "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" that software architects unlike other species such as hair-dressers and telephone cleaners will not be on board of the "rescue spaceship". But that is a completely different story.

Enjoy your life as a software engineer, because you are and always will be a Very Important Person. All other colleagues should keep in mind: don't forget to praise and worship your software architects. You depend on these strange but smart lifeforms!