The concept of, and quest for, an Agile Architecture is a hot topic these days, and as far as I can tell, it’s a debate that will continue for some years yet. Most likely the term agile will go the way of so many other buzzwords, and fall into disrepute, but I hope the premise that it’s good to work flexibly and reactively with your customers outlasts the current hype. I’m fairly optimistic th...
Here’s how the story goes. There’s a meeting of all the big cheeses at our favourite company, Gristle and Flint. It’s quite usual for the other directors to vent their frustrations at the CIO - the desktop hardware refresh is running late, IT personnel costs are on the rise, the web site was down all weekend, new budget requests are coming in to support stuff with weird names like ‘middleware’...
Creating software in the corporate environment is a complex business and complexity is a wonderful breeding ground for risk. There are two types of risk that need to be dealt with: acquired risk and inherent risk. Acquired risk will be the subject of a later post. It’s the quid pro quo of software development - choose the bleeding edge, expand your scope, try something experimental, and you’ll...
I’ve never been that easy with term software engineer. I use it, and have been proud to have been one in my career, but it’s the connotations that come with the word engineer. Real engineers work, for the most part, with physical, mathematically predictable issues. They build roads, design machines, bridges, skyscrapers, operate lathes. Like software projects, engineering projects overrun in t...
How is it that you can sit through a film, even a fairly tedious one, that last ninety minutes to two hours, and yet frequently become arse-numbingly twitchy less than ten minutes into a PowerPoint presentation? I grant you, even fairly dull movies are vastly more interesting than most presentations on SOA governance, but should they be? You get paid to do something during the day that for mu...