Julian Browne

The New New Tool

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:15:00 -0400

Bob and Alice sit in a cubicle at the end of the floor. For much of their working day they are pissed off. They are forced to do their job using a tool implemented by The Project some years ago. The Tool was an over-complex inappropriate hulk when it was selected. The Tool is made by The Big Vendor. We've all heard of The Big Vendor. They market The Tool to many industry segments and have a specialist pre-sales team for each segment. The Tool was very expensive. Because of its complexity it's hard to do simple things quickly with The Tool. To work around these inadequacies various shell script ... [more ->]

NoSQL in the Enterprise

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:46:00 -0400

Welcome to part two. Last time we looked at the experience of getting a NoSQL product accepted in an enterprise environment. Assuming you got through that, the next step is to do something useful with it. Like any tool, you will only get good stuff out if you know how make the best of it. In this case that means not treating it too much like a relational database and understanding the internal nuances.

For our particular set of requirements we chose [MongoDB] ... [more ->]

Freedom from the Tyranny of Schemas

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:45:00 -0400

Time flies - it was nearly two years ago that I wrote 'Strained Relationships', an article extolling the potential benefits of NoSQL data stores. My main point then, and now, was that certain features of the new wave of non-relational products looked a promising solution (in part) to improving speed-of-change in large enterprises. Sadly, too many articles in the NoSQL space still focus their attention on drooling fanboi speed and whilst it's true that NoSQL products are generally faster than their relational cous ... [more ->]

The Attraction of Laws

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 13:55:00 -0400

I noticed last week just how many half-written articles I have queued up for completion. Postwise, the last twelve months has been heavy on ideas but light on completion. Sorry about that. Unless you think my stuff sucks in which case: "you're welcome". It's been a very busy period and writing time has been hard to find. But when I look at some of those half-formed works I see that they lack a narrative sense of beginning, middle, and end. Ideas are great but I find it hard to summon up the enthusiasm to finish them unless I am also caught up in the story that brings them to life.

[IMG:wand ... [more ->]

The Secret Sauce

Sun, 29 May 2011 14:50:00 -0400

Last time, I was talking about what I consider to be the general lack of a crisis in software development. And it got me thinking - if there is no crisis in software development, no inherent flaws in our tools or our methods, then there must somehow be a way to convey the appropriate use of these tools and methods in order that everybody could get it right every time.

Ah ha, I thought. A book. A book entitled "The Secret Sauce". A book that will make ... [more ->]

Crisis Over

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 05:17:00 -0500

So I have a question, or at least I think I do, because maybe the answer is obvious and any sense of there being a question is redundant.

Why do so many articles on software development these days (and for some time) start with outlining how truly awful, and late, and expensive it always is?

I've said it too, often. But it's getting boring. Statistically, if you were to parachute into a randomly selected IT development project today, the odds that it's building the wrong thing, or the right thing badly, or that it's hugely late and has cost more than planned are overwhelming. We know tha ... [more ->]

Ungoverning the Business

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 09:00:00 -0500

If there's one aspect of enterprise IT guaranteed to get the dander up it's Standards and Governance. Some time ago I wrote a short piece on governance called The Governance Apparition making the point that governance should never really be seen as separate and distinct from 'doing things'. If a company has a process for 'doing things' and an internal body (usually architecture) tries to 'govern' the outputs of that process the governance will fail.

It will fail because it's almost impossible to avoid making governance look like a hindrance to delive ... [more ->]

Hammer Time

Mon, 17 May 2010 19:30:00 -0400

To a man¹ with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A well-worn phrase used to alert us to the dangers of getting so caught up with one product or technology that, whatever the problem we are trying to solve, our answer is always to use it. On the surface it seems like good advice. You wouldn't want to artificially restrain your efforts by choosing a completely inappropriate technology, would you?

But how would you know? Delivering good software is never easy. If it was people like me wouldn't get to piss and moan on the internet about how hard our lives ar ... [more ->]

Strained Relationships

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:33:00 -0500

About four years ago I sat in a meeting that had finished early. We were chatting away and the subject turned, as it always does, to the lamentable state of IT. In the preceding weeks I'd asked finance to run me off a number of reports showing just what we were spending on various aspects of our integration architecture. They made pretty scary reading. Wherever we had invested significant funds to improve and mature our infrastructure we were now spending significantly more and taking longer per-project even for minor changes. So this wasn't one of those daily, common-or-garden, grumbles about ... [more ->]

Law and Order

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 07:42:00 -0400

In the technology justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the architects who investigate standards and the developers who commit the offences. These are their stories.

INT. COURTROOM - MORNING

The case before us has troubled me deeply over recent years. It's a question that periodically pops up in various online forums and one which often invites heated debate - probably why it never seems to achieve any sense of resolution.

My serious and honest question is this:

Has the experiment failed? Is it time t ... [more ->]