Value Propositions are as to marketers, as Gannt charts are to project managers or debuggers are to software developers.
But value propositions can and should be more than marketing hocus pocus. What value propositions promise, imply, conditionally promise, or avoid mentioning at all are a reflection of what is important to the business. This conviction works its way into philosophies of product design and priorities for organizing and staffinf up service operations.
This article (http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/value-propositions-more-than-marketing/) will explore the nuances of value propositions, with some modern day examples to illustrate the points.
SCRUM is a popular agile development methodology that was first popularized in the early 1990’s by Ken Schwaber and others. It features short (2-3 week) development sprints, development team accountability, and separation of the chickens (management stakeholders) from the pigs (developers).
Software architecture is a high-level approach to the conception of a system. It was initialy popularized in the mid 1980’s by the writings of David Garlan and Mary Shaw. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI), affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University has been a major force in spreading the software architecture mantra. Today, virtually every software development group of 12 people or larger has a software architect on staff.
However, during the past 20 years, SCRUM and Software Architecture have lived a somewhat tenuous existence. Like other agile methods (such as XP), SCRUM is not a believer in big design efforts up front. Planning mainly consists of choosing a team, and capturing and prioritizing a number of user stories. From that point, the development team and product manager select the set of stories to work on during each sprint, and the developers figure out how to design the solution.
The SCRUM methodology is intended to have fast reaction times to changes in requirements or priorities. During a sprint, no course changes are permitted, but between sprints, anything goes. If the changes are significant, the development team relies on refactoring existing software and leveraging automated unit tests to ensure no regressions.
This article (located at http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/scrum-and-architecture-partners-or-adversaries/) explores the relationship between SCRUM and Software Architecture, primarily from the perspective of a recent project that tried to blend both.
Around two years ago, I started writing a blog on value modeling and architecture. The results of this effort are posted in the pages of this blog. I will be taking a hiatus (hopefully brief) from my writing – predominately due to time constraints. So, I thought it would be useful to wrap up with a summary page, one that attempts to capture the concepts that I think are essential to all software architects (and quite possibly other types of architects, too). In the following page, I identify 8 core concepts and describe each with a short paragraph. Following the paragraph, I include 2 or 3 links to other articles in this blog that expand on that concept, for anyone looking for more information.
12:26 PM 3/29/09: Added a new diagram and paragraph to the summary
http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/architecture-in-a-nutshell/
Most of us have watched our retirement portfolios and children’s college funds shrink by 50% during the past six months. As painful as this is, there are lessons to be taken away. No, I’m not referring to the people who want to lynch those who received million dollar bonuses from AIG. And I’m not even referring to the people who now want to regulate anything that moves.
No, I’m talking to the people who want to understand some of the fundamental causes, and think about how little understanding of the risks caused by the real underlying factors actually made it through the “split pea soup” we happily call communication in our day and age. How will the world function when information that must be conveyed won’t fit in a cell phone text message?” Do we coast merrily along hoping that our surface-level assumptions hold water? Or do we cross our fingers and hope that the other guy has the answers (then point an appropriate finger when things go wrong)?
I don’t profess to know the answer here. Too much depends on the fickleness of human behavior. But I think that the excellent March 2008 article in Wired, written by Felix Salmon, is a great place to start, and I hope that the article that appears in http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/conceptual-distance-and-the-2008-market-meltdown/ helps to frame it properly.
Most of us are familiar with Dante’s “Seven Deadly Sins” – lust, gluttony, sloth, greed, envy, pride, and wrath. And many of us remember the vivid depiction of these sins in the movie Seven.
Imagine if Dante were alive today. What might he have to say about the state of software product development? Few would doubt that this activity has its own special collection of aberrant and deviant behaviors. Perhaps the sins of software product development aren’t as intentional as the original set, but they sure can impete and frustrate the best efforts of those of us who work in this space.
So, the article http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/seven-deadly-sins-of-product-development/ is devoted to exploring the Seven Deadly Sins of Product Development. It was fun to write. I hope it is enjoyable and informational to read.
Recently, the topic of architecture style has gotten more discussion. A colleague, Ruth Malan, noted that the Microsoft Application Architecture guide has devoted a chapter to the topic. Ruth contrasted their definition with the one she published in her blog in July 2008. In addition, architecture giants, such as David Garlan, Mary Shaw, and Roy Fielding have each weighed in with their own definitions.
So why does this matter? Why should a practicing architect care who specifies which definitions and whether or not they are consistent. Does anybody’s work day really depend on a definition?
Personally, I think it can. But I don’t really think it’s about the definitions anyway. I think it’s about identifying, clarifying, understanding, and discussing the concepts that underlie the definitions.
At the end of the day, I think that a clear picture of what architecture styles are, and how they relate to architecture formulation, is extremely important for all practicing architects. If you are skeptical, take a few minutes to read my article at http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/architecture-stylin/ and leave a comment to let me know if you agree or disagree.
A member of an Internet software architecture group I belong to posted a question the other day. His current organization is leaning toward separating requirements specification and architecture, in effect, removing the software architect’s voice from the requirements definition process.
While there are several reasons that people in an organization might follow that path, none of them further the success of the system being built. While I consider myself to be an experienced driver, I don’t consider me to be qualified to lead the requirements definition of the next generation Lexus. While I recognize good accelleration, handling, and braking when I see it, I simply don’t know enough about fuel injection, compression, engine electronics, suspension, fuel economy, cooling, or any of the dozens of concerns that separate one car from another. No. This subject is too complex not to be left to the experts.
Yet, stakeholders of other systems feel empowered to take control of the requirements definition process, feeling as though once the essential “what” decisions have been made, they can safely lob the requirements specification over the wall to the engineers, who will somehow figure out “how” to do it.
This article http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/requirements-vs-architecture/ explores the relationship between requirements and architecture, and illustrates the paradox of how some requirements must driver architecture while others must be subordinate to it.
Well, it took a bit longer than I thought, but the 4th article in the “Complexity-Driven Development” series has been posted.
This article (http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/complexity-driven-development-%e2%80%93-part-4/) applies the Complexity-Driven process to software architecture to a system that automates the routing, scheduling, and dispatching of drivers in a local area operation. In addition, the example shows how the process can be applied to a product family architecture problem, as we consider three different types of pickup/delivery operation:
o LTL (Less than TruckLoad) – specializing in handling shipments ranging from 500-10,000 pounds
o Overnight Parcel – specializing in handling documents and small parcels typically under 150 pounds
o Private Fleet – specializing in making deliveries of a firm’s products to its customers. Examples include bottled water delivery, resturaunt food service, uniform dry cleaning, and beverage distribution
About a month ago, I posted a pair of articles that describe a method I call complexity-driven development. These two articles discussed the rationale for this method and described a process for how to perform it.
Today, I have posted the third article in the series (http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/complexity-driven-3/). This article describes a problem to be used to apply this method. The problem domain is local-area transporation operations, ranging from less than-truckload (LTL) trucking to overnight carriers (Fed Ex and UPS) to embedded delivery fleets (bottled water delivery, resturant supply, uniform service, etc.).
This article discusses the common factors that affect all local-area transportation operations. It also discusses each of the three contexts to highlight the differences in their current state, pain points and constraints, and desired future states.
This is a complex and rich problem space. The presence of the three similar, but different, contexts will challenge you to figure out how to address them. Will a single system be sufficient? Will three different systems be necessary? Or is it possible to architect a product family platform/framework that can support high quality systems for each context? The complexities you discover and consequences you assess will inform you.
A fourth article (in this three part series) will be posted shortly with my application of the complexity-driven development method to the local-area transportation problem.
In this blog, I will try to post challenging, thought-provoking writings about topics related to how systems provide value. Some of the thoughts contained here follow conventional wisdom. Others branch off and try to take a very different perspective on this problem.
My philosophy is simple: modern day systems are complicated, in many ways. And to make matters worse, these ways interact with each other, and the whole mess evolves rather quickly. As a result, I feel that it is vital that systems architects:
- Be able to understand how and where value is created by a system. We spend an awful lot of time and money building complex systems, but too often the result is something that the designers think the users will benefit from, or don’t much care whether they benefit or not (because the system was fun to build).
- Be able to understand that value varies by context and situation (context is a change in external forces by location or role, situation is a change in external forces by time or circumstance). This is especially important for product family architecture. Many organizations pursue product families in order to achieve ROI gains by capitalizing on commonality. Unfortunately, aggressive exploitation of commonality is often a prescription for failure. Instead, the critical differences in challenges between contexts/situations must be understood, and a strategy that exploits commonalities while respecting these differences has a decent chance to be successful.
- Understand that many different subject matters are an integral part of a system, and many different subject matter experts are needed to uncover and assess complexities. On top of this, it is critical to realize how much these subject matters interact. While these interactions amplify complexity, the problem is worse. Frequently, many of these subject matter experts can be fluent in their own subject, and nearly clueless in others. This creates a severe obstacle to communication (more specifically, our ability to actually understand what each other means). Recognizing this situation is the first step toward addressing it.
