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September 13, 2006SD Best Practices Conference
I spent some time at the Software Development Best Practices conference in Boston yesterday. I wanted to check out two event modeling classes being offered by Mary Gorman of EBG Consulting. This was Gorman's inaugural presentation of her event modeling method, although, like any good modeler, she was basing the method on other tried and true modeling techniques. It was indeed interesting. She was presenting the method as a techique for defining requirements. I've been working on an event-driven service design method for the past year, so I naturally wanted to check out what others are doing in the field. Bottom line is that events are indeed important if we want to create agile event driven architectures. And we need methods to help people do this.
I became even more convinced of the need for new methods after attending some other sessions and looking over the full offering. There were LOTS of modeling and methodology sessions offered. Everything from UML modeling, agile Model-driven development, Scrum, process modeling, etc. In fact, what was in short supply at the conference was a list of sessions that began with the letters SOA. It was clear from the number of programmers in attendance that many were looking for new ways to improve the analysis, design and delivery of software. If they're not thinking much about SOA methods now, they will need to soon!
Surveys consisently show that a minority of companies have more than a few services in production. My guess is that even those that have many services deployed do not yet have repeatable methdologies with consistent artifacts. Without such methdologies, the success of the project depends on the skills and experience of the people doing the project. Design and development methodologies inculcate best practices and help reduce risk of failure. As SOA matures and implementations become more widespread, methodologies geared toward SOA implementations will become a requirement.
Posted by bethgb at 01:59 PM in
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Agreed. Or in blogging terms "+1". I've written a bit about this myself:
"Lack of Methodology. What’s missing—and desperately needed—is a publicly available, cohesive, services definition methodology. Cohesive doesn’t refer to degree of documentation. [I believe a methodology should contain the right amount of methodology to accomplish the task, no more, no less.] Rather, with the word “cohesive”, I am referring to the service definition activities that span business modeling, analysis, and design. You find a service (and the need for it) during business modeling. You define and refine the service during analysis. You further refine and provision the service during design.
In such, the business definition of a service is derived independent of technology implementation—current or future. As notation and tooling are used to transition the business service definition to technical implementation, the business intent must be retained.
Since the emergence of a good methodology happens over time, from real-world experience, I encourage practitioners to share their tips and challenges publicly, and join or create practitioner-led forums to advance real-world SOA."
http://elementallinks.typepad.com/bmichelson/2006/05/observations_fr.html
Great seeing you yesterday. -brenda
Posted by: brenda michelson at September 13, 2006 03:18 PM
I think you can say the same thing around methodology to life cycle management. There are no repeatable processes that allow for management of the Web services one they are in production. The essence of BTO.
Posted by: Al Aghili at September 28, 2006 06:43 PM
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