Dealing with creaky legacy platforms

The following article, written by myself and my colleague, Matt Simons, was published in the December 2010 issue of the Cutter IT Journal and is re-produced here with kind permission. It was also the subject of a talk we delivered in Santa Clara.

The landscape is changing

Since the dawn of the software era, systems have generally followed a lifecycle of develop/operate/replace. For the type of systems our company, ThoughtWorks, specializes in (typically built over the past 10-15 years), organizations expect as much as 5-10 years between significant investments in modernization. And some of the oldest core systems have now reached 40+ years – far longer than the average life-span of most companies today!

IT assets are relatively long-lived largely because modernization often represents a significant investment that doesn’t deliver new business value in a form that is very visible to managers or customers. Therefore organizations put off that investment until the case for change becomes overwhelming. Instead, they extend and modify their increasingly creaky platforms by adding features and making updates to (more or less) meet business needs.

For decades, this tension between investing in modernization versus making incremental enhancements has played out across technology-enabled businesses. Every year some companies take the plunge and modernize a core system or two, while others opt to put yet another layer of lipstick on the pig.
Continue reading “Dealing with creaky legacy platforms”

Simple code is music to my ears

Have you ever opened up a file of source code and flinched at the complexity that comes screaming out at you from the screen? Well I’m imagining an IDE plugin that could do the screaming for you.

There are many measures of code that are objective and metrics driven, but there are others that are more subjective and taste based. I can’t tell you from a quick glance how many afferent couplings there are in a given piece of code, but I do have an almost immediate sense of how elegant the code is. In my mind elegance is all about solving complex problems with simple solutions. That’s the art rather than the science of computer programming.

Continue reading “Simple code is music to my ears”

Ant Fu

We’ve had some discussions recently about best practices when creating Ant scripts, so I thought I’d write up a few of my favourites.

Managing Ant target dependencies

“depends” are great, until your build file gets bigger than a couple of screenfuls. You can end up with a crazy spaghetti monster of dependencies very quickly. On a few builds I’ve worked on we’ve had a basic rule:

Targets can either have depends or a body, but not both.

Continue reading “Ant Fu”

Blocks of Code

Coding really is become child’s play. This recent BBC news article points to some of the ways kids are being introduced to programming.

The good people at MIT have put together scratch a visual tool allowing kids to do drag-n-drop coding. The help screens give a good idea of how it works. Basically differently shaped blocks are put together (lego style) to form programs: a loop looks like a capital C and holds all the nested statements; booleans are pointy ended and only fit in pointy slots – likewise numbers are round and only fit in round slots … a nice simple introduction to strongly-typed languages. It actually fits pretty closely with how I visualise blocks of code, so it looks like a great way to introduce children to the coding mind-set. The welcoming colourful blocks are non-threatening and simple to understand.

Continue reading “Blocks of Code”

Java is dead – long live the JVM

I had an interesting meal last night with the ThoughtWorks delegation to JavaOne. They were in town in support of the news that Mingle is going to be launched on JRuby.

I’ve seen some demos of Mingle and it looks great, but of equal interest to me is the choice to release it on JRuby. This seems to be another step along the road of Java moving down the stack. Java was selected as the delivery platform because corporate IT understands how to deploy, integrate, support and optimize it; Ruby was chosen as the development language because of the productivity and expressiveness of the language.

Continue reading “Java is dead – long live the JVM”