The notion of the application as the best way to package software capabilities is losing relevance. Digital business cuts across application functions, inside and outside the organization. Modern value streams require breaking up application capabilities and dynamically reassembling the digital assets like Sir Mixalot. Remember the Album? Before music streaming, the album was the dominant...
Design thinking is a widely used “outside-in” approach to develop great user experiences. It’s about time that building the API experience, as the gateway to a business’ digital assets, follows the lead. Let’s Talk Humans interact with computer applications through a user interface. This could be a screen and keyboard, swiping on a mobile phone, or speech recognition like Siri or...
Indiana Jones had it easy. Most of the artifacts he encountered were tangible. An exploration of ancient applications is like software archaeology, complete with phantoms, dark spells, and riddles. Ah, the joy of legacy modernization. What is Legacy Anyway? One of the fun facts of digital transformation is that organizations depend on existing applications for their would-be shiny digital assets...
Emerging architecture is a characteristic of agile software development. Instead of the Big Design Up-Front, software architecture emerges along with development activities. This becomes difficult for large projects, so enterprise agile approaches balance forward thinking with the rapid development of features that create business value. With a bit of planning, an architecture focus doesn’t...
Cloud platform services continue to expand. There is a growing opportunity to accelerate application development with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. Some organizations take advantage of these to cut down coding and dealing with application infrastructure. Others… not so much. The old Not-Invented-Here syndrome is alive and well. Well-established technology teams often don’t...
When I bought my 1940s house, it had barely any water pressure, so I hired a plumber to assess the situation. He spent a good while in the crawl space, following offshoots of galvanized piping and corroded connections. When he finally emerged, his message was not what I expected: “Son, you have some creative plumbing going on there”. There are two things you don’t want to hear:...
