The SOA Chasm
During a discussion the other day, I found myself repeatedly asking the question of how many organizations could make the leap from an organization dabbling in services (SOA believers) to an organization living SOA and benefiting from services (SOA achievers). I kept referring to the SOA chasm, this nearly insurmountable gap that needs to be crossed to move from an SOA believer to an SOA achiever. The image below is my visualization of this gap.
Microsoft Publication: SOA in the Real World
Tad Anderson posted about the release of an SOA-related e-book from Microsoft concerning Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This is one area in which Microsoft has remained notably quiet compared with competing enterprise software vendors such as IBM and Sun. As Tad points out in his post, Microsoft has made some forays into SOA publications and they have been pretty readable.
Software Process Customization and The Development Case
One of the most common misunderstandings or missteps in following a particular software process is to follow that process in a blind, one-size-fits all fashion. This is especially true if you are mandated organizationally to use a particular software process. Just as the founding fathers could not have foreseen the challenges of the modern world when authoring the Constitution, there is no way that the creators of a generic software process could understand the nuances of every particular project where their process would be used.
SOA Governance
If you work in the IT world today, you have a greater chance of not finding a Starbucks on a randomly selected block in Manhattan than you do of not hearing the term “SOA” during your daily workday. It’s unfortunately not nearly as often that I hear or read something about SOA that sounds reasonable, practicable, and overcomes my otherwise skeptic view of all the hype that so often masquerades as SOA. The recent ITConverations Podcast with Todd Biske and Ed Vasquez from MomentumSI is just the sort of real-world advice that avoids the hype and gives a heavy dose of ground truth reality.
Mis-queue - How the Dow lost 200 Points in the Blink of an Eye
In the final installment of this March 1st trilogy, I’ll hit something really topical, the precipitous fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) two days ago on February 26th. For those of you just diligently minding your stakes in the market, you probably got wind that all the major indexes tanked pretty badly on the 26th. The Dow, however, tanked in a rather unnatural fashion that was quite different from the others.
Software Engineering, Ethics and the FBI Virtual Case File System
Technologists who spend their time working on line of business projects are typically exposed to subtle and not-so-subtle messages about business ethics. Most recently, the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has touched most of our lives in some way, shape, or form. At a bare minimum, it has heightened our awareness of how terribly wrong things can go when the trust afforded certain practices (accounting and reporting, in the case of SOX) proves to be misplaced.
Reusable Asset Specification (RAS) and the Reuse Process
In my efforts to understand what drives software reuse or the lack thereof, I’ve been looking for formal reuse standards, processes, and practices. I’ve been examining technology agnostic materials as well as researching the approaches taken by each of the respective major camps – software factories for Microsoft and Model Driven Development (MDD) from the Java community. This post, in particular, is more concerned with technology agnostic materials.
Attenuation and Other Great Ideas
IT Conversations pushed out a great series of podcasts again last week. As always, good things seem to come in three. In this case, the three were IP telephony, transportation networks, and collaboration. The diverse range of technologies and topics covered in these three podcasts represent a microcosm of the IT Conversation offering; just reaffirming their commitment to appeal to an intellectual audience (myself excluded) with a broad set of interests.
SOA Practices
Over the last several months, I’ve really been trying to get my arms around SOA and develop a meaningful opinion and knowledge base on this so often used, even more often abused, and ever-more-frequently maligned three letter acronym (TLA). Along the way, I’ve discovered a couple of great resources that have helped shape my thinking and hone my implementation skills on the topic:
Fowler and Schneier - Seperated at Birth?
It’s been a while since I’ve posted my last entry. To get myself back in the groove of things, I thought that it might be nice to post something lighthearted and entertaining that your average tech weenie would enjoy. Now I don’t know if you follow the gurus of the technology world but my research has turned up a set of long lost brothers amongst the talking (or blogging) heads. Check out the two pictures below. The one on the left is Bruce Schneier, cryptography and computer security wunderkind and designer of several cryptographic algorithms, including Blowfish and Twofish. The one on the right is Martin Fowler, refactoring, pattern, and agile god.