Building Blocks
Future Software Technologies
Semester programme:Software Engineering
Research group:Interaction Design
Project group members:Abdelrahman Elsayed
Dimitar Atanasov
Grigoriy Nikolov
Ivan Bakalov
Ivaylo Chevarganov
Project description
Backstage is an open-source developer portal created by Spotify that centralizes services, tools, documentation, and templates in one place. It helps teams standardize how they build and manage software while improving developer productivity and consistency across projects.
Context
Software architecture is the domain of developing software, where the distinctive elements of a particular software platform are defined. To ease the development of software architecture, building blocks are defined and can be seen as reusable elements for a wide variety of applications. One such example is the authentication portal. Most architectures need some kind of authentication. By defining a building block with automatic configuration and deployment, the development time of these elements decreases significantly, depending on the requirements. When done with multiple elements, the basic infrastructure can be set up very fast, and software developers have more time focusing on project-specific requirements.
Results
The group project involved creating multiple reusable building blocks within Backstage, including an authentication building block using Keycloak and several Virtual Human–related components. Close communication with the Virtual Human group was essential to identify which parts of their system could be transformed into beneficial and reusable building blocks. As a result, a Virtual Human LLM building block and a Virtual Human sensory pack building block were developed to support AI-driven interactions. All Virtual Human–related building blocks were properly documented in Backstage to ensure clarity and reusability. In addition, ArgoCD was used to deploy the building blocks on a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster, enabling automated and consistent deployments.
About the project group
We are a group of 5 software students, During the Complex software architecture course we did work together on the building blocks project. We worked on it for 3 days a week.