Category Archives: Thoughts on the World
I don’t really believe in a common architectural process. As the author of a successful project management book, and recent articles on data architecture methods, I probably shouldn’t say this, but to paraphrase a famous quote, “When I hear ‘process’, I reach for my gun!”
This is a story of a project I worked upon which followed an informal, agile process, but delivered a successful architecture. Hopefully it serves to support my assertion that agile can have an architecture, but needs an agile architect.
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Almost all integration projects contain one or more transformations (sometimes called “mappings”) between two different structures holding equivalent data (for example the order tables in the database, and the order XML message). We know how to model the individual static Continue reading →
I’ve just posted my review of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everthing”. I found it an excellent holiday read, athough a general science book with almost no illustrations or equations took a bit of getting used to. For Continue reading →
Tuesday, August 16, 2005 in
Reviews,
Thoughts on the World
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about a “city planning” metaphor for Enterprise Architecture development. Pat Helland’s article “Metropolis” in the Microsoft Architecture Journal is a very good example (see my post on this for some key Continue reading →
A bit of a change from my more serious posts, but maybe a useful lesson in analysis, here’s the sorry tale of just how complicated I managed to make listing my top ten favourtite films. I hope it gives you Continue reading →
I’ve just posted my review of Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolfe’s excellent book on Enterprise Integration using messaging, “Enterprise Integration Patterns”. Overall it’s an excellent book, and wiil probably become a “bible” for those involved in the high-level design of Continue reading →
Please forgive me if this sounds like a rant, but I’m very annoyed. Someone who should know better has without warning changed a public interface, with the inevitable effect that dependent systems, in particular my blog, have broken. The offender? Continue reading →
Monday, July 18, 2005 in
Thoughts on the World
I’ve just read an excellent paper by Pat Helland of Microsoft, in which he likens the development of cities and manufacturing in the 19th century to the development of systems and business models now. His conclusion – IT at the Continue reading →
Does anybody know if Microsoft have killed off their Architecture Journal? I was just about to write a post linking to it, and I find the content has been moved to an archive area and all the links have changed. Continue reading →
Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz has set up an interesting new site / blog dedicated to software architecture. Of particular note, he’s trying to put some detail on the architecture “process” which is often negelcted as a single box on the development process Continue reading →
There seems to be quite a lot of activity on the “Domain Specific Language” front at the moment. Martin Fowler published “Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?”, in which he concludes that the common programming pattern of setting Continue reading →
In an interesting echo of my last piece (Why Software Isn’t Like Building Construction), Scott Ambler has analysed bureaucratic processes as a response to management fear about what can go wrong in software development. His conclusion is that these processes Continue reading →
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