Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged design
Agile software development, the principles. Principle 11: The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Dec 14th
This is the eleventh of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able to follow the changing business requirements to strive for competitive advantage.
The question is: is this going to work in practice or is this only based on a nice marketing and sales story.
Principle 11: The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
For a long time the engineering expertise (and also software engineering) was based upon the condition that you worked with specialists. These specialists emerged from the principle of division of labour and made it possible for these specialists to focus their attention on their specialism and create the best solution within their field of expertise. The Interaction designer designed a user interface, the architect created a global systems model, developers created code and infrastructure specialists created the necessary environment to run the application on.
Everyone was specialized and delivered the best solution within their capabilities. However when all these components where put together, noting worked. It is an illusion that specialists can design and foresee everything beforehand.
Within agile projects the solution is to use a self organizing team to perform these tasks. This team may consist of specialist, but this is not a requirement. The requirement of this team is that they work together and self-organize all aspects of the systems to be delivered. This team is permitted to make errors and invent their solutions, provided that they deliver and evaluate frequently (retrospective) and learn from their successes (and errors).
The ADF 11g Area Template – for micro level layout design patterns
Jun 29th
ADF 11g offers various facilities for reusables. To name a few:
Task Flows provide packaged, self contained functionality that consists of both User Interface and Data Bindings and potentially even some process logic and multi step navigation. Task flows can expose parameters that accept values used to dynamically influence the task flow’s behavior. Task flows do not expose facets (which could be an interesting extension of the task flow mechanism). Task flows can publish events that ADF can propagate to consumers outside the region that consumes the task flow.
Declarative components provide a way of packaging reusable clusters of ADF Faces components – usually a fairly small number – that may define parameters and facets through which a usage of the component can be configured and injected with additional content.
Page Templates are a third reusable – typically used to provide a page with one or more containers to hold the page’s content in combination with a frame that has some boilerplate elements – for example titles, menu-items etc. Page templates expose one or more facets into which the contents from the consuming page is injected. Page templates can also publish attributes through which the consumer can pass information used to influence the templates look & feel. Page templates can use data bound components and will then have their own Page Definition.
This article will focus on the Page Template and will explain why this component is somewhat oddly named.
Agile software development, the principles. Principle 9 : Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
Dec 28th
This is the ninth of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able to follow the changing business requirements to strive for competitive advantage.
The question is: is this going to work in practice or is this only based on a nice marketing and sales story.
Principle 9: Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
The first time I looked at this principle I thought: “How is this possible”. Agility focuses on quickly delivering working software (reading: “Quick and dirty”). I experienced this is not true. Attention to technical excellence is making the agile process working better. Technical excellence can make the development process more flexible. In this context I would like to point out that there is a difference between technical excellence / good design compared to complex design and technical complexity. How many developers, designers and architects (the ivory tower / PowerPoint architects) cannot resist creating complex designs, patterns and code with no other purpose than to show off their technical superiority? How many projects have stranded in complex designs and abstract meta-models without creating any business value? These projects are good to be displayed in the Museum Of Modern Software Development but completely useless in the real world.
Smart technology and smart design
Every developer, architect and designer must work with principles of smart design in their minds. In my opinion there are only two principles: 1) the concept must work and 2) other team members understand and are able apply the principle.
Smart technology and good design has its greatest advantage when it is used for the benefit of the whole application and the whole team. Not just for sub-optimal improvements for a single function or a single developer. Good excellent technology and good design has to make coding easy and the application modular, more flexible and adaptable. By using the right frameworks and supporting tools you are able to deliver higher quality software much faster than you where used to. In practice this means using frameworks for common tasks like authorization, persistence and navigation and tools for building, releasing and deploying your application.
In fact all tasks, that are labor intensive and demand a lot of concentration and focus, are likely candidates to be implemented via frameworks and tools.
