24 February 2019
Standardisation does have a place, but it should be reserved for infrastructure and collaboration rather than languages and tools.
30 August 2018
There is a growing sense of unease around how larger organisations have implemented agile. In particular, there is a tendency towards centralised control that can be at odds with the agile preference for individuals over process.
29 July 2018
It’s easy to get caught up in unrealistic notions that you can re-write a legacy system or gradually decompose it. There are other, more pragmatic approaches that can help to modernise architectures and enable new development.
19 December 2016
Test coverage statistics are much loved by management teams and code quality tools. They tend to associate a high level of coverage with robust, well-managed code bases. Wrongly, as it turns out.
2 June 2016
Serverless computing makes bold promises of development without having to worry about environments, scaling or deployment. Haven’t we been here before?
5 May 2016
How do you organise code ownership for services that do not align conveniently with team or organisational boundaries?
23 March 2016
An API gateway can solve many generic problems in an API infrastructure, but you do need to define a clear remit and protect against creeping scope.
2 July 2015
Gartner’s definition of enterprise integration as a service is so wide that it can be difficult to draw any meaningful comparisons between the platforms in the “leaders” space.
5 May 2015
Large scale rewrites of systems are loaded with risk. You can address this by preparing the ground in advance and adopting an incremental approach, but a willingness to be pragmatic is essential.
19 October 2013
Given how important APIs have become in driving the reach of applications and services, it’s surprising how little investment is made in the usability of APIs as opposed to UIs. Perhaps the principals and techniques used by UX should be applied to developing more effective APIs…
16 July 2013
Change is an inevitable and even desirable part of distributed development. Managing the impact of that change is the difficult part, particularly when change affects the service interfaces that bind a distributed platform together.
4 June 2013
Sharing services and APIs can appeal to a desire to reduce duplication and improve development efficiency. It’s a worthy ambition though the journey there can be littered with costly traps for the unwary.
15 January 2013
Large-scale development increasingly involves distributed teams as organizations seek to manage costs and leverage resources on a global scale. However, sharing code between distant development teams gives rise to problems that can only be addressed in part by processes and tools. You also need teams to communicate directly and build trust.
8 January 2013
Technology decisions should not be made in isolation, particularly when you are trying to weigh up building a solution or buying a third party platform.
3 September 2012
Technical debt may be a great metaphor to describe the corrosive effect of quick and dirty design decisions, but it can be difficult to identify, measure and manage.