application development

Here’s a couple of skills developers will need in the years ahead

April 9, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
I saw this list of 10 skills developers will need in the next five years – developers not programmers you notice – and I was struck by several things.
First and foremost it still assumed that application developers would be programming – not assembling applications from components, not specifying the behavior of a system [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much III

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Concluding my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to answer the specific comments I got. First, the reasonable ones:
Ken said:
It depends on the business requirement. If business rules need to be changed on the fly then a rules engine framework makes the most sense. If, as [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much II

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Continuing my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to take some of the arguments Alex makes and show why I think his arguments should lead one to adopt a business rules approach. Despite the vociferousness of some of the comments and the tone of Alex’s post, [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much I

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Well last week was exciting on the ebizQ blog – thousands of new visitors after a link from a popular programming blog. This article – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – referred to an old article of mine – Don’t soft-code, use business rules that had been prompted by his [...]

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Forrester on event processing and business rules

February 23, 2009

Last month Mike Gualtieri and Charles Brett published “Must You Choose Between Business Rules And Complex Event Processing Platforms?” In this they ask and answer a question that has come up a fair bit recently:
How can you choose between investing in a business rules platform and a complex event processing (CEP) platform? The answer is [...]

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Decision Management and software development I – Agile

February 13, 2009

Last week I posted Focusing on decisions to improve the software end product and I decided that this week’s posts would be a series of follow-ups on how decision management can and should impact software development. Today on how it should impact/be a part of Agile, tomorrow on Model-Drive Engineering and Thursday on DSLs (Domain [...]

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Focusing on decisions to improve the software end product

January 30, 2009

The Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals had a post on a 21st Century Software Development Process that reminded me of one of my favorite topics – the need for programmers, especially Agile programmers, to get on…

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The role of decision management in creating (and maintaining) a common vision

September 3, 2008

An interesting article on the role of the business analyst in creating a common vision caught my eye this morning. The article focused on creating a common vision but it made me think about maintaining and developing that common vision over time, particularly of the complex logic in a system. Procedural code does not lend [...]

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A reader asks about business rules in Oslo

August 11, 2008

A reader asked me last week about how I saw business rules engines fitting in with UML, SOA and Microsoft. The article discusses whether Microsoft’s Oslo strategy for SOA will be based on UML or merely offer support for it among many standards.
First, let me say that I think it is increasingly clear that application [...]

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More on the IBM/ILOG Relationship

August 11, 2008

I got a briefing last week from IBM as part of my researching of the IBM/ILOG acquisition (I blogged about this here). Back when I was at IMPACT it became clear that IBM was getting focused on events, rules and policies – they talked about Points of Agility, points in a business where variability is [...]

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A reader asks… about development, business rules and model-driven development

August 4, 2008

I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking:
Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely?
But the whole thing got more [...]

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Believe in business rules (I do)

August 1, 2008

Earlier this week I posted Application Development 2.0 in which I addressed what I see as some of the issues with current development practices and tried to explain why I think a declarative, business rules approach is essential. This (and some blog posts around the blogosphere) made me think about the mismatch I see when [...]

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Application Development 2.0

July 30, 2008

Ann All had a post on Agile development brings IT, business together that had the great phrase “application development 2.0″. In the article she mentioned some very worthy objectives for this 2.0 version of application development. Here they are, paraphrased slightly.

Encourage close collaboration between developers and end users
Involve users in quality assurance processes
Don’t use traditional [...]

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First thoughts on the IBM/ILOG announcement

July 28, 2008

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

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The Future of Application Development

May 21, 2008

I’m going to be on stage with Mike Gualtieri soon but I thought I would drop in and listen to him on the future of application development. Sadly this meant missing a session on BI but even I can’t be in two places at once. Mike’s theme is that the value of application developers in [...]

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Dynamic Business Applications

May 21, 2008

Connie Moore and John Rymer kicked off today talking about Dynamic Business Applications and their first discussion was around brown paper bags. They made the point that brown paper bags are a pure commodity and all you can do is reduce costs. Other kinds of bags offer more opportunities for innovation and, thus, more margins. [...]

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Why Events Matter To The Business

May 20, 2008

Last session of the day (also blogged on paper) was Charles Brett on Why Events Matter To The Business and what this means for application development professionals. I heard Charles talk on a similar subject at the IBM IMPACT event -Live from IMPACT – Business Event Processing.
While many more business and IT people are [...]

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Bringing a business domain to bear on decisions

May 9, 2008

Mike made an interesting comment in response to my recent post on the future of application development. He said:
Are business domain tools necessary to enable a non-trivial development role for businesspeople?
Like many good questions the answer is complicated – in a way, both yes and no. I do agree with Mike that a non-trivial role [...]

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Some thoughts on the future of application development

May 8, 2008

Mike Gualtieri of Forrester had a blog post a few months back that I missed then but that he pointed out to me this week – What Is Your Future? In it he outlines two scenarios at either end of a continuum. One is that application development changes in incremental ways such that “The application [...]

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