Skills Library Article:

The Role of Architecture in Business Analysis
Understand the architecturally significant aspects of business analysis that a project architect should focus on.

by Michael Rosen

Business Analysis
Imagine yourself on an assignment at Northwinds, an options trading company. They have brought your team in to help upgrade the critical applications used day in and day out by the traders themselves. As new kinds of options and other financial instruments are created, the old, inflexible applications are breaking under the pressure for change and integration. Today is an important day and your trepidation peaks as you pull into an empty spot in the parking lot. As you look around, you notice that your car is the cheapest vehicle in the lot, dominated by BMW’s, Porches, Jaguars, and the occasional Bentley. These guys make a lot of money, and they don’t have a lot of time or patience for ‘theory,’ ‘architecture’ or excuses.

Still, you know that to meet the new regulatory and conformance requirements, and to achieve the goals of common processing and reporting, you will need to have both a business model and a technical architecture.

The business model defines the processes and entities of the business and identifies what needs to be common to meet the new system requirements. The technical architecture will define patterns for implementing the business on a common technology platform. It will have to support the business architecture, but on the Northwind project, the business model is your focus and responsibility, not technology.

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Skills Library Article:

Sun Java Development and Design Concerns
Modern development platforms are similar enough that their general characteristics can be understood by studying the specific example of Java.

by Binildas A. Christudas

Platforms and Frameworks
In this article, I will take a pragmatic view of the Java programming language and also show how it is different from another similar language, C#.NET.

My First Cup of Java
During the early ‘90s, I had been programming in multiple platforms including C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal and even in Auto LISP. It was challenging and interesting too to program, especially to model and analyze stresses of our mechanical designs using Finite Element Method (FEM) packages. But more interesting was to gather information about a new programming language at that time called Java. At the time, only one colleague of mine was into that! Within a year, my few colleagues and I decided to taste Java brew and soon we were building Java-based software commercially for one of the top airlines in the world. Since then my colleagues and I have parted. The airlines too have changed, but I still brew Java—every day.

Brewing Java with Contract
My first big Java project was to build an expert system-based airline middleware system.  Here I first learned about interface-oriented development or “programming by contract.”

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IASA Blog: Events...Yours or Theirs?

by Paul Preiss

Ok here's what IASA is trying to do. How many of you have been to an event and said, "I can't believe all they talked about was SOA (fill in technology or idea here)?" I bet more than a few. I saw an event recently and it was over 55% SOA talks. Out of 21 topics 12 were SOA. Now come on, I've used large ESBs/SOA/EAI techniques in multi-million dollar projects with millions of transactions going over the hub but SOA has never been and will never be 55% of my job. In fact it was more like 5%. The problems we had were in security. They were in performance (much of which was due to our use of SOA). They were in effectively describing the architecture to stakeholders. Using effective communication techniques. Handling a multi-iteration, multi-increment project with 2-3 concurrent teams in multiple locations. Testing practices and usability. Infrastructure scalability. But above all they were in ensuring the shareholders were getting their monies worth and that the projects would release successfully. So why do I (and the rest of us) have to be saddled with 55% SOA talks?

I dont want to slam too much on this single event (it was not a SOA event by the way but a top line architecture event), they at least are putting on talks for architects and some of the content is excellent. It's just there is so much more to our field.

This is why we are doing the IT Architect Regional Conferences. The chapters run them and you attend. If you want a topic, just go to your chapter leader and ask. Or better yet get on the speaker selection committee and presto chango it's now your event and not theirs.

Oh and by the way, proceeds from the events stay locally so it's a Jerry McGuire "Help Us Help You" type of thing. If you think this is all trash talk, please flame away. If not let's get some real content out there.

In the next day or so you will see a poll on potential topics (most taken from the skills library) for events. Vote for your personal favorite. Or better yet for the one that will help you do your job better.

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