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dimanche, 7 octobre 2007
Architectural assets
Peter Eeles published on the Rational Edge eZine an excellent article concerning the “assets” which the software systems architect uses trough his job. I find this article extremely interesting because it formalizes well these assets which one uses implicitly. This formalization provides a good base to structure our realization and stock of knowledge. The central point of this article is the description of each metamodel element.
Which are thus these assets that composes this capital ?
- Patterns: architecture, design and programming
- Architectural styles
- Reference architectures
- Technical frameworks (an implementation of J2EE) and application frameworks (software package like SAP or Siebel)
- Existing applications
- Components library
Can one identify other assets? for my part I would add the “example or reference implementation” asset which one can possibly classify like an example of implementation of a reference architecture (for example the “Sun‘s Pet Store”: http://java.sun.com/developer/releases/petstore/ or “Oracle‘s Virtual Mall Shopping”: http://www.oracle.com/technology/sample_code/tech/java/j2ee/vsm13/index.html ).
The granularity and completeness characteristics identified by Peter Eeles to categorize these assets are interesting. These axes are located nevertheless at the model level. If one instancize this model and leads to a set of architecture components, an important characteristic for these components in the broad sense (pattern, software component, architectural style) is the maturity and the experience feedback we can have with respect to a component in particular.
Finally, I think a formalization effort is always welcome to structure a field knowledge. When this formalization is shared by all is even more appreciable, so the interest to see the OMG proposing a specification on all of these reusable assets from the information system.
Besides, like says Peter Eeles, in order to work on the life cycle of this assets base : how to create them? how to re-use them? how to set up an organization and a culture of re-use and sharing. Here, we attain the central characteristic of knowledge job like our: tha architect capacity to set in music in a creative way its knowledge and experience, in short its competence. To conclude this post, I would add that this is this creative part, always too few to my taste, which makes our job interesting.
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