Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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Jay Fields presents his concept of Business Natural Languages (BNL). BNLs are a type of Domain Specific Language, designed to be readable by any subject matter expert, which allows to create maintainable specifications and documentation. The example language is shown using Ruby.
As it gets more and more difficult to adapt software to new demands, the temptation to rebuild it in order to update the architecture grows stronger. For this risky undertaking it is essential to choose the right strategy. Several authors provide insights into advantages and disadvantages of different possible options in terms of cost, technical complexity and potential commercial risk.
At NFJS Venkat Subramaniam, co-author with Andy Hunt of "Practices of an Agile Developer," shared his pragmatic approach to some of the important technical and non-technical factors contributing to project success, including: coding, developer attitude, debugging, mentoring and feedback.
Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can play a "consultant" role, and should think about developing consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not about the exchange of money, but to help create stellar results for the client while working in a manner that adheres to their own values and preferences.
The wider adoption of Agile software development has raised questions about how an approach that shuns up-front design and analysis can coexist with the emerging practice of user-centered design, which has a detailed user research and modeling phase before development begins. In this article Dave Churchville explores how the disciplines can be used together for an effective development process.
Called "the grandmother" of the agile methodologies, DSDM V1 was released in 1995. The methodology is owned and collaboratively developed by the members of the not-for profit DSDM Consortium, and until V4.2 was only available to members. But the recent V5 or "Atern" release is now publicly available. Director Hugh Ivory provided an overview at Agile2007.
Business users doing programming? In this interview, Charles Simonyi presents a radical new way of building software that separates business knowledge from software engineering knowledge. The claim is to simplify the creation process for software as business experts directly contribute using their customary domain description which results in accelerated innovation.
Of course, "anything more than 'barely sufficient' process is waste," but what does that mean for your team, or my next project? In this 60 minute presentation from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, Todd Little shared a model to help choose the right "flavour" of Agile for different kinds of projects, and discussed the importance of 'steering' throughout the project's duration.
Here is a story about Agile's use in a governmental organisation: at the 2006 APLN Leadership Summit Mark Salamango and John Cunningham looked at the problems and opportunities of introducing Agile in Army environments. True Agile practices cannot be 'commanded' or 'directed’ but frequent delivery offers Agile leaders a "soft" kind of power that is, in fact, very effective.
Domain Driven Design is a vision and approach for designing a domain model that reflects a deep understanding of the business domain. This book is a short, quickly-readable summary and introduction to the fundamentals of DDD; it does not introduce any new concepts; it attempts to concisely summarize the essence of what DDD is, drawing mostly Eric Evans' book, as well other sources since published such as Jimmy Nilsson's Applying Domain Driven Design, and various DDD discussion forums.
