Saturday, April 19, 2003

.NET Brings the Architecture to the Forefront Google Search It I thought this article captured well the role of the architect.  It describes three of the key functions as follows: "... an architect sees the world in term of forces to be balanced. Security is critical, but it must be balanced with ease-of-use. Performance can't be ignored, but the fastest design might be impossible to maintain or too difficult to develop to meet time-to-market requirements. An effective architect thinks creatively within the context of his experience to discover a range of solutions that balance the system of forces that apply to the target solution. He's aware of the standard forces, such as maintainability, performance, security, supportability, stability, scalability, and time to market. And he searches for the unique forces that apply to the project at hand." "Second, the architect must become the intermediary between the business and technical worlds. She must speak both languages, having the ability to see business issues through a technical lens and technical issues in a business context. Being bilingual, she becomes the advocate for users, business sponsors (those responsible for the return on investment, or ROI), and developers (see Figure 1)." "the architect maintains conceptual integrity over the development lifecycle. Architects make sure that, in the heat of the battle, the mission doesn't get lost. Working under the pressure of implementation schedules and technical hurdles, developers sometimes make decisions that cause a project to veer away from the business goals. The architect must make sure that the mission isn't undermined at any point in the development process." Another interesting point from the article was its mention of how the role of architects within the Java realm seems to have been more prominent in the past: "In enterprises that focus on Microsoft development technologies, on the other hand, the position seems to have less prominence or isn't represented at all." In a sidebar to the same article there is mention of different architectural roles identified by Microsoft. 5:16:12 PM   []    comment []

Rational Straddles Java and .NET Google Search It There is an interesting article/interview on the future of Rational especially in regards to their continued commitment to the .NET platform in addition to WebSphere. Perhaps even more interesting are their comments about providing a complete suit of development life-cycle tools and how they haven't more work to go in this area.  Here are some quotes from Mike Devlin, the general manager of Rational software: "We are also expanding the value developers get from modeling. The preview we're doing this week integrates testing into the model. Test cases are generated from the model." "Now, we're going beyond that with the technology preview I mentioned earlier, integrating testing and deployment. We have many years to go before we fully integrate the life-cycle." "You're right that Microsoft with Visual Studio had led the market in visual development. But the Java community is getting within striking distance of the Microsoft environment in terms of having those capabilities." 7:11:45 AM   []    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Mark Michaelis.