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The power of Tags and Comments

A software architect models customer domains and maps them to excellent software constructs. The solution shall support future customer groups and expand to store additional information.

Tags, also called labels provide an informal ontology to classify customer data. Tags are extensible and are machine readable.

Comments empower users to store relevant unstructured information. Comments are only for human beings.

What are good approaches to provide searchable tags and labels and avoid wild growth of useless records?
Can you as a designer govern the ontology defined through labels?

Entities, Identifiers, External identifiers and Names

A software architect models customer domains and maps them to good software abstractions. Soon you correlate internal efficient identifiers, meaningful external identifiers and domain entities. 

How do you relate with external systems and communicate with other companies?  

How do you define internal identifiers which grow with the application success? 

How can you bridge the customer world with your software solution?

What are the good practices to create a maintainable, legible and efficient model of your domain model? 

A Journey Implementing Digital Invoices

Our company has the ambition to digitalize all our workflows. We proudly state we never bought a printer or a fax machine. 

Analog machines should become obsolete in the digital age. Companies should be more environment aware and save some trees.

Switzerland finally introduce a digital payment slip. It is based on a QR code and still assume you need to print it. The European Union is more inovative and mandates that invoices to government parties must be digital.

Our company exchanges contracts and invoices with partners and customers using the standardized and well-known PDF format. It is time to explore extensions to support the new legal requirements in Switzerland and in Europe.

We show open source based solutions and the trade-offs we had to accept. Beware our solutions are based on the Java stack.

Legacy Systems Refactoring

With refactoring you can take a bad design, even chaos software, and rework it into well-designed code. Most often it is cheaper refactoring a legacy application instead of rewriting it from scratch.

Each refactoring step is simple, even simplistic. Yet the cumulative effect of these small changes can radically improve the design.
Martin Fowler

Gradle 6.4 Has Finally Java Module Support

Java 9 release introduced the concept of modules within the Java language. Java 9 was released in September 2017.

Until now creating Java modules was quite cumbersome and Gradle did only offer limited support through external plugins.

Finally with the release of Gradle 6.4 in May 2020 software developers can easily generate well-behaved Java modules. We had to wait almost three years for native support!

Support for modules is native in the Java plugin. You only need to add one configuration line. Start using Java modules and have language support to enforce modularity in your product.

Four Powerful Sentences

You are a line manager, a Scrum master, a senior developer. Investigate the use of four powerful sentences.
- Sorry (one word)
- Thank You (two words)
- I am Wrong (three words)
- Can I Help You? (four words)

Walk the talk. Be a leader. Prove you have honesty and empathy.
You shall use these four sentences below as a way to calibrate how you interact with your teams.

As a rule of thumb state honestly and genuinely these four sentences multiple times each week. Otherwise you are probably more a command and control boss and not truly a servant leader.

Agile Component Design

Your are responsible to create or modify a component in your current application. This is a design activity.

How can you create a good, legible, maintainable component architecture? How can you validate your functional and non-functional requirements?

Yes you are right. You are responsible for architecture decisions at component or subsystem level. Below a set of tools to improve the quality of your design.

Java Records Are Here - Available in JDK 14

We need justification not to use immutable objects in ours solutions, rather than an affirmative reason to use them.

Records provide a first-class means for modeling data-only aggregates. They are available in Java since release of JDK 14.

Records are often seen as syntactic sugar to easily create immutable objects without having to write a lot of boilerplate code. And records as a clean definition of immutable objects can have a tremendous impact on your component design.

You as a designer have to reflect why your abstractions are not immutable and what is the rational behind. From experience it improves greatly the quality of your design.

How Agile Collaborators Learn

Most products are developed by a team, and these achievements are the fruit of teamwork.

Software product development is now agile, and most often uses the Scrum approach.

Just putting a bunch of people together will not produce a high performance agile team. Quite a few companies find that out the hard way.

How can you increase the odds to create an environment where agile teams bloom and perform?

Calibrate Your Agile Approach: Bill of Rights

When eXtreme Programming first came out, one expectation it worked hard to set is who gets to make what calls on software projects.

For example, business has the right to know how long something is going to take and when it can expect things to be done.

Conversely, developers have the right to know what the priorities are, and to be able to do good work.

To that end, eXtreme Programming - XP - created the Customer and Development Team Bill of Rights.

A Journey to be a Digital Company - tangly llc

I long dreamed to work in a digital environment. I shall no longer print out a form, sign it by hand and use snake mail to deliver it to the receiving party.

Our software service company is an ideal candidate to validate if this assumption is realistic.

Profit is like the air we breathe. We need air to live, but we don't live to breathe. - Frederic Laloux

Agile@Scale - Are Common Patterns Emerging?

Your organization has decided to introduce agile at scale in all development departments or better in the whole company.

Your Chief of Agility COA, Chief of Digitalization COD or Chief of Change COC was in an expensive training and has selected the appropriate framework for your company.

Welcome to the club of companies introducing agile approaches and having no clues why they do it and how they could be successful.

Here some hardly learnt truths worth knowing when starting such an endeavor.

Imposing Agile methods introduces a conflict with the values and principles that underlie Agile methods -- Martin Fowler

Time to Migrate to a Modern JDK, Laggards!

Are you still using Java 8 to run your mission critical systems?

Are you truly using a six years old technology stack?

Are you already applying for a Java laggard club membership?

If you are still using Java 8 you are using technologies released in Spring 2014. You are missing all the improvements in the garbage collector, runtime engine and various API.

Java 11 LTS was released in September 2018.  The current LTS release is one year old. You had one year to migrate to this long term solution version.

It is time to modernize the fundament of your application and invest a small amount of effort in it. The payback is really good.

A Commons view on Scrum

Agile approaches encourage common ownership of artifacts during product development. Historically commons is the term used for shared resources. Can we apply the commons learnings to agile and Scrum approaches?

Interestingly economists were kind to state common ownership is doomed to fail through the tragedy of commons theory published end of the sixties.

Thirty years later Elinor Ostrom showed that commons can indeed work well if you follow a small set of rules. She found century old examples scattered around the world.  She was awarded the Nobel price in economics for her findings in 2009 and dissipated the previous fake news.

The picture shows a Suone in Wallis, Switzerland. The constructions bring water to arid regions and are build and maintained by communities. It is example of commons in place for hundred of years and is one of the concrete implementation studied by Elinor. Mountain pastures are also managed as commons in Switzerland. You will find a drawing of Suone on the hundred Swiss Francs note.

Agile Architecture within Scrum

You are applying the agile, lean approach to your software product development. Your teams use Scrum or Kanban to deliver running software every two weeks.

Agile architecture is a key element to improve the quality of your product and reduce cycle-time of your product outcomes.

Your journey toward greater business agility starts by identifying what outcomes are most important to your company’s success. A key component is to find out how to create great architecture within the Scrum framework.

The World is a Better Place and We Must Tackle Climate Change

The world has really improved in a lot of areas.

Stop whining we are doomed.  And yes we must act strong and fast to tackle the climate change disaster. 

But do not forget how much the world bettered the last centuries.

We are not doomed, we must solve the next challenges instead of just complaining and doing nothing.

Ask yourself if you need a car. Travel with train instead of flying. Schedule a video conference instead of a business trip. Each step reduces your carbon footprint. Millions of persons taking similar steps will be a huge improvement. Reduce your plastic and paper usage. Just do it!

Agile Code is Clean Code!

You are applying the agile, lean approach to your software product development. Your teams use Scrum or Kanban to deliver running software every two weeks.

To create an agile architecture you must write agile worthy code. And agile code is always clean code.

Start early, do it continuously and soon your code will be clean, legible and free of defects.

Agile Architecture Principles

You are applying the agile, lean approach to your software product development. Your teams use Scrum or Kanban to deliver running software every two weeks. The product market introduction is a success and you will successfully sell the solution for the next ten years.

How shall you define the software architecture of your product and insure a long living and high quality solution? The experts tell you the design is emergent, what does it means?

Code Scene as Crime Scene

You have a successful product and happy users. Slowly the cost adding new features is creeping up and product margins are shrinking. Which crimes did put us in this dreaded situation?

How can you analyze the history of your product's source code?

How can you explore the social dimension of your product development? How can you find good approaches to increase time to market and improve development costs?