At Microsoft, we use the term “frame” or “framing a problem” in the context of project management. You might hear somebody ask, “what’s the frame?” or “how have you framed the problem?” A Frame is simply a way to partition a problem. The heart of a frame is coming up with a context to understand the dimensions that matter and figure out how to prioritize and scope. One way teams often frame a space is by building a catalog of user stories and then organizing them into themes.

Customer Connected Engineering (CCE) is a practices we use across our patterns & practices teams for engaging customers throughout the life cycle. We involved customers during the planning, development, and release of our deliverables. This is a draft slide set that shares how we do Customer Connected Engineering inside patterns & practices, including our key practices and guiding principles.

From a software performance standpoint, “hot spots” are an area of intense activity. They’re hot spots because they’re frequently executed code paths with some sort of friction or bottleneck. They represent potential optimization paths for improving the performance of your code or design. You find the hot spots by measuring and analyzing the system.

Stepping back, we can use “Hot Spots” more loosely. We can use them to gather, organize, and share principles, patterns, and practices for performance.

Security Hot Spots are a lens for security. If you know what you’re looking for, you can find it. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can waste a lot of time. The Hot Spots provide a way to find, organize and share software security knowledge. You can use hot spots to share principles, patterns, and practices. You can also use hot spots to share knowledge around threats, attacks, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures.

Rather than deal with a laundry list of information, use hot spots to focus your attention on key categories. The Hot Spots are actionable and they are high ROI. The Hot Spots helps you simplify, clarify and gain insight before you elaborate, maximize and optimize.

The Agile Architecture Method is a way to bake quality into the life cycle. It’s also an iterative and incremental approach for architecture and design. In its simplest form, it’s a way to help you identify potential hot spots against your prioritized scenarios. The hot spots are key engineering decision. The main hot spots are cross-cutting concerns, such as data access, exception management, logging … etc. and quality attributes, such as security, performance, reliability … etc.