Syndicated from ebizQ
As the summer doldrums roll on I thought I would try and stir things up a little with a “2.0” post – specifically some thoughts on a software stack for “Application Development 2.0”. Such a stack would:
- Model processes, events and decisions as first class objects
- Support declarative (rules-based) approaches to developing business logic
- Use visual metaphors to manage rules, processes, events
- Integrate analytics and dashboards directly
- Develop rich visual interfaces
- Support legacy modernization, legacy integration and legacy understanding
- Support collaboration, especially collaboration between IT professionals and business users
- Contain tools that do version control, configuration management,
approvals, deployments etc. in a way that makes sense to business users
and that integrate well with IT’s tools for these activities
Business analysis are going to become more and more important in application development and business users themselves are going to insist on being part of the process. The days when programmers got to work on their stuff without non-technical participation are gone. Business analysts will take more and more responsibility for both the overall application strategy and the development of composite applications from existing components. They will increasingly prototype new components and work with programmers to evolve prototypes into production-ready components and with business users to evolve the behavior of those components.
Bottom line, Application Development 2.0 means that application development tools will increasingly have to shift their focus to business users and analysts so that non-programmers can be brought into the process.
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Hi James,
Totally agree with you on these points! However, I think it should be emphasized that all aspects of an application need to be modeled in a declarative way using visual metaphors. So, also the domain model (information objects), page flows, and lower level application logic.
I think we should model both the organization and the IT system with declarative models and try to connect these models. See this piece on Model-Driven SOA for a somewhat formal explanation of these ideas.
> Business analysts will take more and more responsibility…
I see this happen in practice. The project teams using our model-driven development platform consist mostly of business analysts. So, this happens right now. Do you also see this in practice? Do you have any numbers on the involvement of ‘non-programmers’ in current application development?
Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts!