Sunday, February 26, 2006

 

Delusional Oriented Architectures

There is an interesting behavior that occurs in corporate America in which I am curious if I also practice it...



Anytime, a new approach to software development emerges whether it is SOA, CMM or even the principles of the agile manifesto we folks in corporate America go through a mental excercise of aligning any questionable practice done in the past with whatever the new paradigm brings.

For those who work in corporate America, you may have noticed that many mainframers for example are of the belief that for the last 25 years they have been doing many of the things that SOA suggests. Of course the paradigm itself is not really new only that they have been recently collected into a single work and more importantly branded. There is a difference though in SOA thinking being 25 years old vs. a 25 year old system having thought about it from the beginning.



I wonder when industry analysts and other book authors including myself will ever show that folks who are of the believe that they are doing SOA probably aren't. Likewise, I think the same thing needs to occur in terms of agile software development.

While I have done many agile projects before becoming a full-time employee of a Fortune 100 enterprise, I know have a disease known as hybridism. In consensus-oriented architectures, one must take parts of everyone's ideas and make them work. When this is practiced, is the agile or not! I kinda believe that while I have to label this agile in order to champion a larger goal, in all reality I may be lying to myself. I may be encouraging others to also become delusional.



A very wise architect (name intentionally withheld) several days ago provided me with an analogy on corporate behavior. He stated that architects in corporate America are kinda like a pack of dogs. We wander around looking for stuff to bite. When we find a nice tree, we need to heist our legs and add our unique scent...

Maybe the first thing that needs to occur is for agilists to start working with folks in human resources. The trend towards competencies seems to be growing (Competencies are a trap but this is a topic for another blog) so maybe there is an opportunity to practice hybridism by acknowledging personality styles. Can folks be lumped into one of the following categories:



Would love to hear from other bloggers on whether their enterprises also have similar behaviors and whether they believe hybridism is a mental disorder...









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