Re: [service-orientated-architecture] Anne & Colleagues on SOA and Waterfalls

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 05:32:53 -0700

I blogged about this (http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/2006/03/soa-project-management-killing.html ) a while ago.  One of the things I've done with places where Waterfall as become institutionalised is use Services to break the projects up into programmes, so even if they insist on their "corporate standard" waterfall process then we've broken it down into a series of small (1 month ideally) projects.  Because a series of small projects begins to look oddly like iteration.

Now of course the real question is why do IT departments continue to use a waterfall approach?  Its like someone proposing communism as a viable govermental system with the difference that it was the 70s where waterfall was discredited rather than the 80s.


On 24/06/06, Gervas Douglas <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:

<<SOA development is difficult enough, but if it is done with the
haphazard "waterfall" methodology it is unlikely to work very well or
meet end users needs, said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and
research director for the Burton Group, at today's Burton Catalyst
Conference.

The waterfall methodology is basically no methodology at all, said
Manes, in the opening keynote Wednesday morning, "Application
Architecture and Development: Building Better Software." It is the old
way of writing code without much attention to requirements and then
"throwing it over the wall" to testing with little or no follow up as
to what happens to that service in the large SOA project.

She said working iteratively with attention to requirements, modeling
and especially well defined policies for governance is the way to
begin moving away from the waterfall.

"Establish governance for SOA," Manes told the developers and
architects in the audience. "SOA is really different, it's really
hard. It requires changes in the way you think. You need to start with
strong governance and a development culture that supports good
programming methodologies, including requirements, modeling and
following policy rules."

Following strong rules for application development is especially
important as SOA architects and developers look at open source for
software, she said.

"Open source software is really cool, it's free," she said. "But there
are a lot of bad open source projects out there. You need to establish
strong policies for whether or not you use open source."

She said using the waterfall approach also limits reuse in SOA because
individual programmers will tend to look at existing services and say:
"I know I can do it better." Without methodology and rules for
developing and using services, the promise of reuse will be lost in
what she termed "the not-invented-here syndrome."

She did not say that this is easy or that there is a magic bullet or
single solution that an analyst can recommend and architects can follow.

"We have cultural and technical issues to grapple with," she said,
noting that these include application silos, backlog and cost constraints.

"There is no perfect solution that I can recommend," she said. "You
have to design them to fit them into the culture of your organization."

Speaking in the session on modeling immediately following the keynote,
Chris Howard, analyst with Burton Group, said it is not solved by
management coming in and dropping IBM Rational tools on a development
team. He suggested that the developers are likely to be overwhelmed by
suddenly having a suite of tools thrown at them.

Manes said the move from waterfall to a more iterative methodology
needs to be iterative itself and take into consideration the culture
of the development and IT organization.

Answering the question: "How to get out of waterfall?" She suggested
to start looking at iterative development and begin looking at how do
you do modeling.

Howard suggested that while it is often an afterthought in software
development, the importance of modeling is crucial in engineering in
many other industries. "If Boeing didn't do modeling, would you fly in
their airplanes?">>

You can find this at:

<http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1193734,00.html?track=NL-110&ad=556382 >

Gervas


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