SOA Day 4 - Prolonged Development to Incremental Deployment

Day 1 - Connections = Cost to Connections = Value
Day 2 - Function Oriented to Process Oriented
Day 3 - Build to last to Build for change

Today's mind shift is to shift how we develop and release. Prolonged Development to Incremental Deployment . If you have been listening to the Agile speakers, reading software development papers or news or otherwise been paying attention chances are you have heard this one mentioned. This mental shift is one that is under way. Iterative development has been in place for some time and really has good traction.

My point on this one is we can't stop with just iterative development. The best feedback that we receive is when something is in use. In order for it to be used it needs to be in production. So this means we need to develop things in verticals of functionality that allows us to get them out and in front of our customers. A wealth of ills can be addressed by this. It does require a more deliberate approach and understanding of your overall application architecture. With this though better quality can be released and built.

Just like a fractal grows and grows making the picture more and more complete so does a SOA based architecture. Each bit released enables other bits to be built or released. By releasing these bits in a planned manner as quickly as possible rather than taking months to develop the "complete solution" we can steer our development to what is really needed. Just as I said in Day 3 where we Build to Change we can accept that our requirements are going to shift and be ready to adapt them faster. Focus on business value not the "complete solution". Complete solutions are a fallacy because if there is business value in a developed system more development will be needed.