AntDoclet 1.1
Posted by F Sat, 22 Jul 2006 20:43:39 GMT
I just released a new version of AntDoclet.
No major changes. Now the comments of inherited methods are properly extracted from the parent class comments.
Thanks to Daniel Lindner for this fix.
On What BPM Promises
Posted by F Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:09:00 GMT
Tom Baeyens (from jBPM) wrote an interesting article about the over-promises of some BPMS (Business Process Management System) vendors.
His dicussion addresses two points:
BPM vendors often overpromise by hinting that BPM tools can unify analysis with implementation
Lack of integration between processes and plain general purpose programming language
From my experience with Fuego (now BEA AquaLogic BPM) it’s safe to say that it doesn’t fall in that category. I don’t know what vendors he’s referring to because, honestly, I’ve never spent serious time trying or analyzing other BPM vendor products.
On point #1: BPM over-promises
Tom is on the camp that any serious BPM development (or any “software development” for that matter) will always require a developer. He believes that the case where a Business Analyst defines and deploys a business process without help from developers is limited to BPM vendor demos.
Keith Swenson, on the other side, replied suggesting that BPM could be like Spreadsheets: many business people now use Excel to build their own software solutions without help from developers.
Both arguments have their merits, and I think reality is somewhere in between.
From my experience building BPM solutions for customers, I believe that the ideal of complete IT independence is not feasible today, nor in the near future, except for very simple cases. (not only because of technical, but also cultural reasons).
I’d question that the Spreadsheet example, while interesting, is quite simplistic. What a business analyst can build with a spreadsheet is a lot simpler that what you’d normally need a BPM for. For instance, a spreadsheet “application”:
- is a single-user solution
- Has no concurrency
- No security requirements
- No integration with other system (or minimal integration with a database)
- No transactionality
- Does not “expose” functionality to other systems
- No “enterprise” deployment (just run it in your desktop)
Obviously, you can build a single-user, non-transactional, non-integrated solution with a BPM tool, and yes, a non-developer could do it. But you’d be falling into the toy-example case that Tom hates about BPM demos.
But, I do believe that with a good BPM tool the level of abstraction can be raised so that less technical skills are required to build usable solutions. And, over time, that level will be raised more and more. I’ve seen business people that, after being involved in a couple of BPM projects, they do more and more by themselves, to the point of building robust usable prototypes on their own.
On point #2: Process and general programming languages
With point #2 of Tom’s original post, he states that it’s critical to integrate the process model with a general purpose programming language.
I feel comfortable with that idea, because that’s how it’s been done in FuegoBPM (ALBPM) since day one. And although I cannot say it is the best approach (since, again, I have no real experience with other BPM tools), I can testify that it works pretty well in practice.
As a side note, we believe that it is bad practice to overload the graphical representation with massive amount of decorations to try and express every little technical detail of the process. But the most important point is that you can create a common language between the technical developer, who is responsible for making the process executable and the business analyst, who is responsible for communicating the requirements.
I agree with this, and it’s important. The graphical process design should be at a high-level of abstraction, in the business domain terms, so that anybody can understand and follow the business process flow.
I think the value is not on the fact that a Business Analyst can design an implement a solution on his own. Instead, the value is that the Business Analyst can build initial designs and prototypes, and then keep participating on the process design during the whole development lifecycle, because while developers implement the low-level details, the graphical model (if done right) is still understandable by everyone. And, this graphical model is not just documentation, it’s the real thing, executable.
As a side-effect, BPM is a great tool for facilitating iterative development, helping to close the communication gap between the business owners/users and developers, allowing early and continuous feedback into the development process.
Real-world SOA at Amazon
Posted by F Fri, 09 Jun 2006 00:41:00 GMT
A great interview with Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels appeared in ACM’s Queue magazine. A must read if you care about how to run a modern IT organization.
The SOA acronym has been abused to the point of becoming a dirty buzzword for many. The interview shows how Amazon applies service-orientation concepts with a very pragmatic approach.
WV: …The services model has been a key enabler in creating teams that can innovate quickly with a strong customer focus. Each service has a team associated with it, and that team is completely responsible for the service from scoping out the functionality, to architecting it, to building it, and operating it.
Excellent! That’s what I ment with “Project-Oriented-IT”. I’m glad Amazon has been doing that successfully.
Here’s why it works:
WV: …Giving developers operational responsibilities has greatly enhanced the quality of the services, both from a customer and a technology point of view. The traditional model is that you take your software to the wall that separates development and operations, and throw it over and then forget about it. Not at Amazon. You build it, you run it. This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day operation of their software. It also brings them into day-to-day contact with the customer. This customer feedback loop is essential for improving the quality of the service.
He obviously explained it much better than I did, and with real-world experience to support it.
It shows that the cultural and organizational aspect of a SOA initiative is more important that the technologies used. SOA is not just about building “software architectures”. If done right, it is a better way of organizing IT operations.
You don’t even need to standardize on specific technologies/tools to run an organization with a service model:
WV: I think part of the chaotic nature the emerging nature of Amazon’s platform is that there are many tools available, and we try not to impose too many constraints on our engineers. […] Developers are like artists; they produce their best work if they have the freedom to do so, but they need good tools. As a result of this principle, we have many support tools that are of a self-help nature. The support environment around the service development should never get in the way of the development itself.
Don’t force tools down the developers throat. (Any manager reading?)
Project-Oriented IT
Posted by F Wed, 31 May 2006 03:13:00 GMT
Over the last years I had the opportunity to work on projects for really big companies. My initial observations led me to think that the bigger the company the more inefficient its IT operations are. Economies of scale seem to work against Information Technology and software: the bigger the company the more inefficient, bureaucratic and slower it gets.
But it would be too simplistic to say that it’s just the “size” of the company what makes it inefficient. It’s not. There are big companies that are efficient. True, the bigger the company the harder it gets, but I think it has more to do with the company’s age, culture, and the simple fact that they are inadequately structured.
One important problem I’ve seen in big enterprises is that people are departmentalized by specific roles (Business Analysts, Software Engineering, QA, Operations and Support, etc) and they do not collaborate as they should: they actually fight. They see each other as the enemy. Their jobs are so “silo-ed” that it’s hard for them to see the work of others.
A guy in charge of IT Operations for a huge financial firm described it to me with examples:
“We get a request to put an application into production with little idea of what it does or how it behaves. The application might have been in development for over a year, but we (Operations) do not get to see it until it goes to QA… which is roughly a few weeks before going to production.”
A big problem: developers do not understand how their solutions are really used in production, and Operations has no input into the development process. A lot of non-functional requirements that are essential for keeping Operation costs down may not be taken into account (like proper logging and monitoring, management of the dependencies).
The Business people blame Operations, which in turn blames the Development team for building unmaintainable software, and the Developers blame it all back to the Business people who never gave them the full requirements in the first place, nor enough time to build it right. But since nobody is responsible for the whole thing, no one fixes it. And every new project is run in the same way.
In small companies (think “start-ups”), individuals wear many hats: from “business analyst” to “operations support”. They are all accountable. I bet they are much more efficient. They may produce better solutions, in less time, with shorter release cycles, with less money, leaving happier customers and happier employees.
If I were a chief, I’d try to use a different approach from that of a traditional company.
Read more...GotAPI?
Posted by F Thu, 13 Apr 2006 02:16:00 GMT
Did you know about gotAPI.com?
It provides as-you-type lookups of reference documentation for HTML, CSS, Java, Perl and other programming languages and APIs.