My latest article Polyglot Workflows with Activiti and Silverlight has been published in the current issue of JavaSPEKTRUM. After losts of theory in form of articles and conference sessions, I thought it would be a good idea to present a real example. The Activiti engine is an interesting product in the area of BPM. If you go beyond simple demo applications you might want to integrate it with existing UIs, such as corporate portals. Silverlight is an interesting candidate for this task. The article focuses mainly on the interoperability aspects of Activiti and Silverlight and shows how easy it is to bring both together.
Month: July 2011
Core Values of Great Software
Over the last decade I have seen many software solutions. Some excellent and some really bad ones. But most solutions were somewhere in the middle. They just did what they were supposed to do.
But is this really good enough? I don’t think so. Especially today where time to market is critical and the budgets are limited, functioning software is the bare minimum. On top of that other core values are getting more and more important.
- Functionality – This is obvious. The software must do what people expect it to do in a reliable manner.
- Evolvability – This is also known as sustainability. A value that is important in many areas of our daily life. And also in software development. It means that we don’t want to reinvent the wheel over and over again. We don’t want to produce waste. Software must be flexible so that it can be reassembled even if technologies change. Investements have to be saved. Evolvability can be primarily achieved through proper software design. Especially service-oriented approaches are promising here.
- Production efficiency – This is the most underestimated value. It means that just work is not enough, rather it must be quick and easy to produce. For a long time IT is has a reputation of being complicated and expensive. As a reaction to that companies are outsourcing to cheaper countries or applying more flexibile development processes auch as Scrum to improve efficiency. Especially the latter has proven to be successful. Choosing the right software is also a good way to come closer to that goal. For example frameworks should not only assessed by its functionality (often done by developers) but also on the ease of use and developing performance.
Although those values are important for every software project, they are especially important in todays SOA/BPM undertakings as they promise to increase agility and time to market. This can only be achieved with software solutions that are flexible and easy to use. Ideally even for business people without a developer background.