Walter Almeida's Blog

The case for Model Driven Software Development (Part 2) Developing high quality, well designed software applications is hard and expensive – MDSD can help!

In the first part of this series, I gave a quick introduction of the MDSD approach. Let's now enter in more details. I will explain here one of the main motivations of going for the model driven paradigm shift or: how a model driven approach can dramatically help make developing high quality software faster and easier. 

Part 1: Toward generative programming? The case for Model Driven Software Development: A quick overview of the MDSD approach

Part 2: The case for Model Driven Software Development - Developing high quality, well designed software applications is hard and expensive – MDSD can help!

Developing high quality, well designed software applications is hard and expensive 

The benefits of designing and implementing applications using a proper layered architecture approach, good separation of concerns, relevant design patterns to make the solution flexible, extensible and maintainable are not to be proven anymore and is a common understanding in the industry. However designing and implementing high quality software this way does take time and is expensive. And this will NOT help you deliver faster. YES you will produce better quality software but it will not necessarily make you more productive, at least not in the short term. It does not mean you should develop bad quality software and YES developing quality software with good design practices will in the medium/long term range be VERY profitable and even open windows for extra evolutions you did not even thought of up-front. But it can prove very difficult to sell quality practices for short projects where the extra cost and time involved for doing a state of the art design up-front will be overkill. And not only the design but also the implementation phase on a highly engineered application can cost you extra resources and time. If you indeed have a layered architecture, then implementing a new functionality will most probably involve writing code in all layers. And if you have designed your application using design patterns, then you will probably have to regularly create a set of new classes for any new feature in your application. A good example is the MVP pattern: for any new user interface you want to include, you have to create not one but at least three classes for that matter.

   

Maintaining a software application is expensive

Many studies state that the TCO (Total Cost of ownership) of a software application for a big part due to maintenance and evolution AFTER deployment to production! This means that what is expensive is not so much the development of an application but its exploitation and maintenance over time.

Implementing a well-designed, state-of-the-art application requires validation and any new development should go through a full validation process, may it be manual (peer reviews), automatic, or both. Don't do that and you can be sure that your quality will degrade rather quickly with time, and inconsistency and hacks will be introduced in your design. And the more engineered your software application is, the more difficult will it be to keep it this way and not introduce bad practices or hacks in the design, which could prove disastrous in the long term. Yes you can document your technical architecture and design principles but it means that it is again extra cost involved, thus increasing the TCO of your application. Moreover you need to find a way to keep the knowledge and know-how in the company and make sure that any person leaving the company does not do so before a proper knowledge transfer inside the company…

On the other hand, a poorly designed software application will most probably cost even more to maintain and evolve. And maintenance and evolution of such an application can to some extend become so difficult that no-one dares touching too much the code base, thus decreasing the ability for the application to evolve and decreasing the application users' satisfaction.

The case for the model driven approach: make quality easy and cost effective

YES it is very frustrating when a client tells you that he understands where you come from with your idea of writing state of the art, well engineered solutions, but that unfortunately for his project he just wants something delivered fast and at a reasonable price. And unfortunately this scenario is not uncommon. So what to do? Forget your dreams to create great designs and develop applications as they should be? Forget about the benefits of well designed quality software solutions for your clients with low budget or working with tough time constraints?

Well this is where proper tooling and especially the model driven approach can help in this direction. Because a properly targeted DSL and associated tools can eliminate the extra effort required to develop a highly engineered solution by automating the creation of all the classes, components and other artifacts required to full-fill the application design. Of course what requires (a lot of) time is the writing of the DSLs and associated tools that you need. However this work will then be reusable for all the features of the application, for the evolutions of the application and for future projects. This makes the initial investment very profitable, not only long-term on the initial project, but even short term for the actual project and for any new project starting. One way to overpass the extra cost involved in writing the DSLs and tools is to find on the market existing DSLs or at least existing tools that can help you quick-start the writing of your own DSLs. Finding already existing functional DSLs that suit your business is hard as any business has its own specificities and rules. However finding a technical DSL is easier as they are reusable horizontally across domains. And I will again give the example of a now very common and well known DSL: the ORM tools. But other more advanced tools exist to generate more than just the database access and persistence part of the application.

   

The case for the model driven approach: reduce the TCO by reducing maintenance costs  

One more benefit of using a DSL approach is also the following: when you are using a DSL to model and generate parts or all of your application, then evolutions of the application will be implemented by changing the model and re-generating the application. Therefore you (almost) don't have the risk to degrade your design quality by not respecting the architectural rules. And you don't need the extra validation step to make sure the evolutions are implemented respectful of the original design principals of your architecture. This is because the design rules are enforced by the DSL itself and the code generation process! Therefore a successful model driven strategy will also result in reducing the total cost of ownership by dramatically reducing the cost of maintenance and evolutions and even further: enforce the software quality in the long term.

We therefore talked about what I consider being the main motivation for adopting the model driven software development approach: the MDSD approach enables the cost effective implementation of high quality, highly engineered software applications while dramatically reducing the maintenance and evolution costs and enforcing the application quality and stability in the long term.

I will keep writing more on the model driven approach, so stay in touch if you like the topic and enjoyed the reading!

Toward generative programming? The case for Model Driven Software Development (Part 1): A quick overview of the MDSD approach.

I am starting now a series of posts on the Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) approach. The reason is that I strongly believe it is a very powerful approach and I will invest time and efforts in 2009 in this direction. There are already tools that are following this approach and probably one of the most compelling success stories is the ORM tools. There are also things going on in the industry and for instance Microsoft is planning to follow the model driven path with its OSLO platform and the M language, so I will also be talking about this.    

The first post of the series is a quick overview of the MDSD approach. The objective here is not to do a full presentation of this software development paradigm but introduce the subject, key terms and overall principles. I will in further posts analyze and foresee what benefits could bring MDSD to the software industry and what place this might have in the future.

Part 1: Toward generative programming? The case for Model Driven Software Development: A quick overview of the MDSD approach

Part 2: The case for Model Driven Software Development - Developing high quality, well designed software applications is hard and expensive – MDSD can help!

 

MDA versus MDSD   

In order to briefly explain what the model driven approach is, it is interesting to start explaining what the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach is and how it differs with a more permissive and flexible MDSD (Model Driven Software Development) approach.       

The MDA approach is an initiative of the Object Management Group (OMG), and is a natural evolution after the introduction of the UML language and its relatively wide adoption on the market. The MDA approach aims at providing a generic, model oriented, tools friendly language that could be used to automate the generation of software applications through the creation of platform independent models and diagrams. This generative implementation is supposed to be done through MDA tools, able to parse the platform independent MDA model and generate code and artifacts for the targeted platform.     

One primary objective of the MDA approach is the platform independence and a universal generic language to describe systems, the same way UML was designed to be generic enough to be usable to describe the different architectural views of a software system, and even potentially apply beyond software systems.     

While this generic MDA approach has the definite benefit of the universality of a language that anyone, and any tool could understand and exploit, it also has its drawbacks. The main drawback being that a too generic and universal language can be too much abstracted from the real system and its specificities. Extensions of the UML language such as stereotypes were invented to solve this problem but make the whole exercise of precisely diagramming a system very difficult to achieve. And the precision and level of details required for a generative approach is of crucial importance, much more than for creating diagrams for the sole purpose of communication and documentation.   

I personally am a big believer of more pragmatic approaches that aim at giving a clearer, less abstracted vision, but closer to the reality of the system. After all, the primary objective is to build systems that work and is not to have a generic description of systems for just the sake of purity. This is for me the reason why the MDA approach was not as successful and broadly used as expected and the driving force why a more permissive and flexible MDSD approach has a much better chance to succeed and convince the community and the market. 

From now on, we will talk about the Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) approach as a generic term that applies to any solution, tools or processes that follow the model driven concept of modeling an application for the purpose of automating its implementation. The MDA approach in this perspective is a MDSD approach that has the specificity of being tightly coupled to, and constrained by the UML language.

So the generic MDSD approach we describe here differs from the MDA approach in that there is not such a thing as a ready to use, generic MDSD approach and associated languages that you can use out of the box on your projects. The MDSD approach is more of a concept, a guidance and new way/philosophy to see software development. So where there is only one MDA standardized set of languages, there are not only one but as many different MDSD tools and processes as vendors or individuals will invest on creating.

   

Domain Specific Languages (DSL) and MDSD 

Let's now have a word on the Domain Specific Language (DSL) terminology. The DSL acronym is often misleadingly used for describing a full model driven approach. However a domain specific language is not really a model driven approach on its own but only a part of a full MDSD approach. The MDSD approach is more than just languages, it is a full set of languages (and more specifically DSLs), tools, runtime frameworks, code generators and/or language interpreters (more on compiled versus interpreted DSL later), on potentially more.    

Therefore DSLs are a major part of (and only a part of) the model driven approach. A DSL is an abstracted language that aims at describing a system or part of a system that we want to model in the most convenient and natural way for the targeted domain. A DSL can take any form as best suited for the targeted domain, can be textual, graphical or both or even take another exotic form.   

A DSL can be architecture oriented of functional oriented. An architecture oriented DSL aims at describing technical layers or architecture centric components and services of your application. A very common example of an architecture oriented DSL are the Object Relational Mapping tools (see the description of Llblgen for an example of such a tool). An architecture oriented DSL can be used horizontally across different functional domains. A functional DSL is a DSL that is explicitly dedicated for a given functional domain and an example can be FpML, used to model financial instruments. Functional DSLs provide business analysts with a proper abstraction level to describe their very specific domain that can then translate to code (the dream of having analysts or business specialists designing applications with no more need for developers...), or more realistically functional DSLs provide developers with a language that can help then translate functional models to applications and code.      

And finally DSLs can be interpreted or compiled. A model written in an interpreted DSL is used "as is" in the real production application, hosted by a runtime (interpreter) able to understand the model and execute operations. In my very basic understanding the M Language (Microsoft OSLO) can partly be used as such an interpreted DSL (more on OSLO on a later post). On the other hand, for compiled DSL, a model has to go through a compilation phase for transformation of the model to a lower level language, such as C# for the Microsoft platform. An example of such a compiled DSL again is the Llblgen ORM tool. It is pretty clear that compiled and interpreted DSL are very different in nature and imply very different constraints.   

In the model driven approach, the DSL or set of DSLs is the way to describe the model of the application you are aiming at implementing. Defining the model of your application is the first step in the model driven approach, followed by the generation activity, or interpretation of the model (more later on compiled versus interpreted DSLs).

   

Generators and Interpreters

The second brick of the model driven approach is the generator(s) and/or interpreter(s). The generators responsibility is to generate from the model anything you need for your specific domain. Artifacts that are useful to be generated range from code to configuration files though user manual, or anything you might dream of automating. Generation can be based on text templates that are useful to customize or extend the content of the generation. On the other hand, interpreters don't generate anything but rather interpret at runtime the models to deliver the required application functionality. A model driven approach can make use of a runtime framework. The final application will then use at runtime the support libraries that make up the framework. This is especially true and mandatory for the interpreted approach but also true for the generative approach. It indeed often proves useful to generate code and classes that are depending and built on top of a well designed and fully featured framework rather than generate the full application code base. This runtime support framework is the third brick of the MDSD approach.   

The fourth brick on a full MDSD approach would be the SDK that allows users of the DSL and generators/interpreters to extend or automate the DSL and generators/interpreters, from instantiation of a model to generation of the application, through integration with other DSLs. I will in a later post talk about DSLs composition and DSL integration with other approaches and tools, to bring the model driven approach even further.

    

That's enough for this quick introduction. Hope it was clear enough, and I will enter in more details in further posts. I will talk more in next posts on the motivations behind the model driven approach and why MDSD is good for you!

And here are a few links to resources related to the model driven approach:

MDA web site: http://www.omg.org/mda/

Microsoft OSLO web site: http://www.microsoft.com/soa/products/oslo.aspx

Podcasts related to the model driven approach:

Software Engineering radio shows on MDSD

Software Engineering radio shows on DSLs

  

Golden Rule #2: Don’t be afraid of refactoring!

Here I am, back after more than a month publishing the first golden rule. I said to myself today that I should keep up to speed with this subject in order to finally end-up with a good number of rules as I find the exercise interesting and opening great paths for thinking and reflecting on limited but compelling subjects.

So the Golden Rule #2 is about refactoring code and software architectures. One may wonder: "Why are you talking about continuous refactoring as a Golden rule??!! After all if you follow development best practices and apply all golden rules, aren't you then expecting that the design and code produced are of good quality, therefore not requiring refactoring?!"

Introduction - what is all the fuzz around refactoring?

Refactoring is often associated to "repairing" legacy code or poorly designed applications. Even though it is sometimes what refactoring is used for, refactoring is also first class citizen of a full agile process of developing high quality applications. I would even go one step further: if a reasonable sized project is achieved with no refactoring phase during its implementation, then there is probably something wrong and a flawed underlying design that will bring you trouble on the path ahead.

Software development is a complex discipline, and the vast number of patterns, tools, frameworks and best practices leads to numerous ways for implementing one scenario. It is all about pros and cons, compromises, and identifying the potential future points of evolutions of the business need in order to be ready for it. 

Even though it is always recommended to do a design first and coding later, I don't believe one could or should do a fully detailed design before writing the first line of code. The key winning idea is to be pragmatic, agile and iterative. Any design should be validated by proper implementation and validation, to then be adapted, enhanced and implemented again. There is a limit to paper diagrams and even experienced designers cannot fully predict the behaviour of the future implementation of there designs in terms of performance, security, usability and fitting in the target infrastructure, nor can predict that the frameworks and techniques that they theoretically plan on using will actually be relevant perform/provide a service as excepted; one exception is if they already designed and developed a very similar application, following very similar constraints and non-functional requirements, and targeted to a very similar platform. Added to these technical only aspects, business needs can also evolve, during the lifecycle of the project, get re-scoped and adapted and therefore require changes in the application technical design. The consequence of this is that refactoring phases will be mandatory to iteratively build the software solution.

 

Another point is that a successful software architecture and design is the result of a collaborative work between several people, architects, analysts, and developers. So, all participants should be involved in the process as soon as possible thus requiring starting the development phase early for efficient and productive feedback from the development side ASAP. As a consequence, refactoring phases will have to be planed and performed until reaching an acceptable quality level.

So why do you need refactoring?

Including refactoring phases in your development process and lifecycle answers to the following needs:

• You need to make sure that your software design and architecture properly address evolving business needs: Refactoring phases can be necessary if a major business evolution requires rethinking of part of the design of the application. The application should always be designed with flexibility in mind and requires that aspects of potential evolutions are properly identified to know where to design and build flexibility.

• In an agile process, refactoring is an essential technique to iteratively build the most appropriate software architecture and design, while gaining in maturity iteration by iteration. This is a key for agile development where functional slices of the application are frequently delivered and most of the times require partial refactoring to move from one iteration to the other and increase quality and relevance of the design.

• Late discovery of functional or technical constraints can lead to the need for a partial refactoring of the application to address this unexpected event. By the way, an agile, highly iterative process can help reducing the risk by early addressing all the aspects of the application, and especially the aspects that are considered high risk.

• Results of test campaigns can reveals areas that need refactoring, for either technical reasons (poor performance, low scalability, etc.) or functional reasons (inappropriate functional behaviour revealed by the UAT that has an impact on technical design). Again: and agile iterative process will help address early these issues.

Rigorously including refactoring phases in your development process will therefore help you increase the quality and relevance of the overall application design, making the application more maintainable, robust and flexible. Moreover, being able to regularly and efficiently perform refactoring sessions without breaking the whole application and entering uncontrolled regression phases will be the undisputable proof that your software design is effectively of high standard.

 

Can I include refactoring in my development process seamlessly and for free?

Ok, refactoring is not a simple thing and it is definitively not a painless, safe action to perform if you are not prepared for it.

First condition to include regular refactoring phases as part of your development process is to actually have a well designed and architected application. And refactoring becomes a way to iteratively increase the quality of this design. But you can't apply proper refactoring as part of the development process for commando like or any other kind of quick and dirty type of programming.

Second condition is that you should have a proper set of unit tests covering your full code base. Refactoring is about rewriting and restructuring code thus meaning creation of new bugs. And you don't want to break what was working before. Therefore a set of unit test with high code coverage will help you (yet not always suffice) verify the quality of the refactored code and make corrections if required. Important refactoring will also require the re-writing of the unit tests, which is ok: just make sure that your new set of unit tests still covers the same functional use cases.

Refactoring can be painful if you don't have the proper tooling to assist you and automate repetitive operations. And the pain can be even worth if you need to refactor across several projects. Visual Studio includes basic refactoring tools that are really useful and a big step forward since version 2005. But you can go even a step further and use commercial refactoring tools. The one I use (and love!) is ReSharper, and you can read my post about it for more details.

Another thing you need is a refactoring compliant source code control system that allows you to seamlessly move and rename files while keeping the integrity of source code repository and version history. And I haven't found such a tool yet. To be honest I haven't tried too many tools as I am quite happy with the Microsoft Team Foundation Server package for building a full continuous integration environment. Unfortunately, TFS does not quite like renaming and moving files and can act weird when you try to do so. For large refactoring, the solution is to start on a new, clean TFS project that is built on the new file structure implied by your refactoring. You still keep the full version history though the previous TFS project but lose the connection with your new project. Another advice to limit the issues you can have with your source control while refactoring is the following: try to avoid to a too deep hierarchy of projects, trying to mirror the namespace tree. Just save your projects on a flat, or as flat as possible, file structure. You still can have a hierarchical view in Visual Studio by creating solution folders. This way, it will dramatically make moving or reorganising namespaces much easier! Don't forget that reorganisation namespace is one of the most common thing you will do while refactoring...

Last point to mention is that it will be useful to have an automated process for updating documentation. Refactoring implies changes in the documentation and documentation is not a good candidate for manual update because it will then never be updated. Solution for the documentation is the use of tools that automatically reflect on the code comments to generate the detailed documentation. So rule is: comment properly your code and run a tool on your code base. The tool I use is Sandcastle. And for more high level class diagrams, you can choose a UML tool that can reverse code-engineer UML diagrams from you code. Visual Studio embeds one very basic tool. I personally use Enterprise Architect that I will describe in a future post. Key element is that you should be able to automatically update the technical documentation if you want to have technical documentation at all!

 

So am I ready to go?

You must be aware that refactoring cycles are time consuming, require courage and patience for the extra effort induced. It therefore requires discipline and a well accepted and applied process that includes these "technical" refactoring phases, apparently not bringing any additional features or business value, but really mandatory in the medium to long term for creating a robust and flexible applications. Therefore the sole idea of technical refactoring being part of the software application development lifecycle is something that needs to be strongly supported by the project management board, and more importantly: really applied during the project lifetime. And this is probably the most difficult part as management teams can have difficulties understanding the need of spending a lot of time, effort and money for something that apparently (but apparently only) does not bring any added value to their business application. And this difficulty can be caused by a lack of understanding of both parties and a low trust given to others.

This leads us to another Golden rule on which I will write later. This Golden rule is not really a development golden rule but a more high level, project level, strategic golden rule: go for collaborative and responsibility driven team organisation rather than for a hierarchic centric organisation. This rule says the following: to make a project successful (be it a software project or any kind of project BTW), you should build a team with well defined responsibilities and skills and trust everyone in the team for his/her competencies and believe and take into consideration the well-founded of their advice. This is the best and more human way IMHO to have a real success on your projects and long term involvement and efficiency of your overall project team. But more on this later, so keep connected to the Golden rules series!!

I have a Dream, an Ambition, a Destination and Faith

I tried today to search for myself on the cloud, trying to "google" keywords and hey! I can find myself, much better than a week ago! I realized that I start to gain visibility, yet not having many visits, but surely getting more and more visible globally. And I must say it is a great satisfaction and I realized something is happening, that the seeds I had been throwing for so long are growing now. And this is why I felt like writing today's post, as a summary of the evolution of my thoughts and feeling during the last many years.

   

I had a Dream….

I had a dream, a dream of a harmonious life, a harmonious world. A world where you get what you truly deserve, where you safely and openly receive and give equally to your surroundings. And I had the even more beautiful dream that this harmonious and positive environment could be complete and extend through personal, professional and social life; and that the business world could seamlessly be part of the host environment for such good and true things.

I had the dream that profitable business and success can be achieved with respect of humanity, justice and be achieved in a positive, loyal and genuine collaboration with the surrounding world. I had the dream that a business can be not only driven by return on investment but also be based on deeper principles, with the aim to achieve a higher goal, born from the mind of the creators and shared by the whole company as the driving force.

   

I experienced Deception…

I experienced deception; saw dark sides of the real world, witnessing conflicts of power, worth: been part of some, seeing corruption, understanding the sadness and negativity of extreme individualism, ignorance of others, disengagement of good principles for the sake of un-deserved, dirty success.  

I experienced deception, for having given 200% of myself for companies that did not deserve so much, at least not so much from me as I was wrong in my beliefs of what they really were. 

I started to give up and felt forced to slowly engrave in my soul this so often heard hurting sentences: "That's life, there is nothing you can do about it, you should stop dreaming, you should be adult and accept reality and live in the real world…"

Resignation was eating me from inside, driving me sad and empty. However there was still this little spark of hope in the depth of my heart, this great positive energy but made miniscule by the impact of experiencing life and uncontrolled interaction with the outer world. Sad but still dreaming from time to time, I woke up one day: HEY !! I AND ONLY I decide what my reality is, I decide if I want to keep dreaming, if I want to make my dreams my own reality!

    

I had an ambition…

I can say nothing but thank this little spark, my guardian angel to have always kept me alive, pushing me to fight, stand for my beliefs, for my dreams, despite of any negative signal that the dark sides of the outer world could send me. So "that's life? There's nothing I can do about it??"… No indeed there is nothing I can do to change the big size company I am working for, if I don't believe what they are doing is right. No Indeed I can't change my so called friends if I believe there are not worth it and don't follow the same principle as I do. But YES I definitively CAN stop complaining, stop being negative, and I CAN choose the company I am working for, I CAN choose my lover and my friends, and I CAN be proactive, and do whatever I am supposed to do to go for what I believe, I CAN choose my life.

My choice was to create my own company. I always have had my vision about how a business should be run, how I would like to build a trust and win-win relation with the members and partners of the company, what good principles should be applied. Yes I knew that I had not a business educational background and that very experienced business owners could just laugh at my words. But still I had my vision and my choice was to implement it, learn by doing and challenge my own beliefs. And I am very experienced myself in my own beliefs; ideas don't make it all, but work and courage just do the rest.

I had the ambition to create a company the way I imagined it, the ambition to prove to the others and first to myself that YES, I can dream and yes I can make my dreams my reality. I knew there was a path to achieve this journey: courage, faith and hard work. I also knew that the path would be long and difficult, but that it would be worth it, and that no big fulfillment can be achieved with no significant challenge and full dedication. 

   

I have a Dream, an Ambition, a Destination, and I have Faith!

Today I have a dream, an ambition, a destination and faith. I simply don't give importance to my deceptions apart from learning how to avoid them as much as possible and how to accept them when they happen to quickly let them fade out.

Today nobody will take me out of my path and my beliefs, a process has started and I have a destination: go for my beliefs and build a company the way I imagine it, the way I dream it. I want to build a company that is truly different, a company where every member will be part of the success, appreciated for his/her skills, courage, and personality. I want to do business a different way, driven by honesty, justice, merit and true human relationship, in the best shared interest of all participants, be they internal or external to the company. I want to go beyond regular business and build it with the same driving principles that I apply to my own personal life. This is my ambition, my destination, my life; faith, positivity and support of my loved ones will be my energy to do it.

About my Blog

The intent of this post is to describe the main contents and goals of my blog and what I will be posting about.

   

Main Topic and scope

As the title of my Blog states, the main topic covered is "Business Oriented Software Solutions". It's all about delivering fast time to market, good quality software that answers to business needs and result in a return on investment. 

The type of software projects that are in scope of what I call "Business Oriented Software Solutions" are commercial projects, and are not included research & development, educational projects and any other projects for which there is no associated direct business profitable value. However, all posts that are technical and about development methodologies and quality are still applicable to all projects.

Also not included in "Business Oriented Software Solutions" are all RAD projects and disposable software applications. Disposable software applications can be proof of concept prototypes or software application that are intended for a single, on-off purpose, and discarded away after use. "Business Oriented Software Solutions" are software applications that are designed and intended to be used on the long term and will most probably have to evolve and integrate new or changed business needs.   

This Blog being about software development, there will be a great deal of technology talks. Even though part of the posts will be technology agnostic, another part will be specific to Microsoft and Microsoft partners technologies. This is because I made the choice of using Microsoft centric technologies for the implementation of my software projects and it is therefore the technology platform I am expert on and will be posting about.

   

Target audience

This blog will cover all activities of a software development project and therefore is targeted to multiple audiences. Depending on your level of implication in software projects, you might be interested in certain posts only. Click on your profile below to filter posts of most interest to you.

   

Posts for business owners: As a business owner you will be interested in posts that reunite software solutions and business and explain how software solutions can bring your business added value and exactly fit to your business rather than your business be constrained and limited by a software solution. These posts do not require specific technical knowledge and yet give a nice and clear understanding on software and technical matters from a business perspective.

   

Posts for technical project managers: As a technical project manager you will be interested in all technical and process & development practices posts

   

Posts for functional project managers: As a functional project manager you will be interested in process & development methodology posts and business related posts. You will be especially interested to read about how to drive a project in a feature driven way and through highly iterative delivery cycles.

   

Posts for developers: As a developer you will be interested in all technical posts and in the process & development methodology posts that are related to your daily activities. May be of interest for you two to quickly go through all other posts to get an overall view on how you job fit in the total project landscape.

   

Posts for software architects: As a software architect you will be interested in all technical posts and especially these posts related to software architecture, development practices, tools and frameworks and design patterns.

    

Overview  

This blog is about "Business Oriented Software Solutions" or: how to deliver fast time to market, good quality software that answers to business needs and therefore result in a return on investment.  

This could seem quite obvious and not relevant to be the object of a complete blog: after all, who wants to build and late deliver bad quality software that is useless, not driven by any business case and not bringing any added value? Well, yes, one could tell that software development can be an exclusively creative and fulfilling, passionate activity for some individuals, but as stated above, less focus here on software developed as part of a commercial company strategy. And still: as a passionate individual you may don't care of your creation bringing any added business value and keep it useless yet exciting, but you most probably still want to efficiently produce high quality code!

So obvious answer is: NO, of course no-one wants to create these useless, expensive, poor quality software applications, so why this blog?? Thing is that developing and delivering these Business Oriented Solutions can prove to be tricky and the purpose of my Blog is to gather and consolidate information to provide guidance on how to best choose, use, re-use and compose processes, technologies, patterns, frameworks, tools and applications to deliver fast time to market, feature oriented, high quality, robust and performing software solutions.

I believe that the key to efficiently build Business Oriented Software Solution is to concentrate and excel in two complementary directions:

• Define the goals to aim at and set these goals as your priority
• Clearly understand the various areas of expertise you need to cover to achieve your goals and make sure you have skilled individual on board in each of these areas. 

And for our matter, Building Business Oriented Software Solutions is a real big challenge and the difficulty is to succeed in three main goals: create solutions that are business driven, high quality and fast time to market. 

And building Business Oriented Software Solutions involve mastering complementary skills in three areas of expertise: the business domain/functional space, technology & development practices and management & project methodologies.

  

The three goals for success

One can list more goals to aim at to successfully deliver Business Oriented Software Solutions, and this list can depend on the specificity of a project and/or business domain. However I believe than the main three goals to achieve that are essential and drive success in most cases are to build solutions that are:  

• Business driven/feature driven: solutions answering a real business need and seamlessly adapting to the business changes and evolutions.
• High quality: solutions technically properly designed and implemented making the solution robust, performing, maintainable and seamlessly welcoming evolutions and new features.
• Fast time to market: solution that have the ability to be delivered or more be iteratively delivered as fast as possible, in order to compete efficiently on the market place.

     

The difficulty comes from the interdependency between these three targets. It is for instance easy to understand that reaching fast time to market result while keeping a high level of quality is not so easy to achieve. This is part of the reason why it's common place to have software that are early on the market place but of poor quality, or software that are of good quality, delivered on time but not aligned with the business requirements and priorities, or even worth: software that is not answering the business initial needs, of poor quality due to the pressure involved by fast time to market constraint and delivered very late as a consequence of the two first problems.

The posts will be written with this in mind and will be oriented toward solutions and guidance to succeed in meeting the three targets.

     

The three areas of expertise involved

Various disciplines are to be conducted as part of as software project and these disciplines require different set of skills and abilities that we can distribute in three areas of expertise:  

• Business domain & Functional space: Know and understand the functional space and business domain that is yours. Should not be constrained by technology or methodologies, as business need is the driving force.
• Technology & development practices: Excel in efficiently using technology and composing the right frameworks, tools and patterns to answer a business need in a robust and flexible way.
• Management and project methodologies: Master appropriate management and project methodologies to efficiently and iteratively delivery software with accordance to business needs and technology constraints.

   

Please note that in a software project there are more disciplines than areas of expertise. If we take RUP as an example, the disciplines are: business modeling, requirements, analysis & design, implementation, test, deployment, configuration & change management, project management and environment. RUP is the IBM iterative software development process (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Rational_Unified_Process) .

You need to be aware that no matter how small or big is your team you will have to master skills in all these three areas of expertise. And the challenge in succeeding in all three areas lies in the inherent difficulty of cross-cutting these three distinct aspects of a software development project that require complete different abilities and most usually different persons who need to communicate and understand each-other and each-other concerns.

      

Outcome of the posts  

Each of the posts that are relevant to creating Business Oriented Software Solutions will be started with tables indicating what goals the discussed topic can help achieve and what area of expertise is concerned and the posts will be tagged accordingly. This way the reader will have a mapping between goals and areas of expertise and a set of relevant posts, ideas, and guidance to succeed in efficiently building Business Oriented Software Solutions.

So here we start, I will now start blogging, I hope you will enjoy the ride!