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Feb 10Patterns of Failure
by in Alex's Soapbox on 2010-03-02Not too long ago, I was at a client site, working to understand and improve their development process. From a birds-eye view, their development organization was a lot like many other Corporate IT set-ups: they had a sizable portfolio of proprietary applications that were built for and used by different business groups. Some of these applications were “mission critical” and had highly formalized promotion and deployment processes, while others were ancillary and were hardly ever used. <shameless_plug>This, along with the medley of technologies and platforms, was why they sought our help in managing and automating their development processes with BuildMaster.</shameless_plug>
But as I dug deeper, I noticed that a significant portion of their applications weren’t applications at all. They were – for lack of a better word – “modules” that glommed together to form an ÜberApplication. Completely unrelated business functions – paid time-off tracking and customer mailing list management – lived side-by-side, sharing authorization principals, navigation controls, and even a “business workflow engine.”