[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML publishing frameworks and software methodologies
We are RFP-driven, and this is reasonably analogous to use-case driving. Because our resources are always limited, we do not add modules (think level of QBE-forms) to the system until we have seen them clearly required in some number of RFPs and so can establish that the customer base at large wants this functionality. Then we have to decide if it is strategic for our system to have this or if it is better to open an API for systems of that class so they can buy best-of-breed. Once the decision is made to build, then we take the sets of requirements of the active customers and attempt to generalize these into a single design that can meet their requirements. This is where the use cases are both helpful and dangerous. A customer will have a fixed idea for what they want to see, and they will vary by customer. The challenge is to provide functionality that they instantly recognize as applicable to their problem and yet which applies to all of their problems. That is the art of systems design and it isn't easy and it takes a practiced team to do it well. No methodology or framework, IMO, are a sufficient substitute for practice. Note: if a functionality is deemed strategic, it is provided free of charge as part of a standard release. If a customer insists on their own version or a non-strategic feature, they pay for its development. This is a workable incentive for convergence and in most markets, convergence is the process that leads to commodization and standardization which works to everyone's advantage. Again, data objects on the X, operations on the Y, and users/uses/use cases on the Z. That is a robust visualization. The marketingHead looks at that and sees market forces. The developer sees design tradeoffs. The system manager sees a real time visualization of the application network. len From: Henrik Martensson [mailto:henrik.martensson@b...] On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 13:33, Oleg Dulin wrote: > > The problem with use-case driven development is that very little focus > is placed on the architecture of the application, forcing developers to > deliver functionality and resulting in unmaintainable complex code. This is wrong. For example, RUP is use-case driven, and places a lot of emphasis on architecture. The fact that a methodology is use-case driven does not impair the architecture of applications in any way. On the contrary, use-cases are a great help in understanding what an application is supposed to do, and thus supports the design of a good architecture. Whether you use Design Patterns, TDD, CRC, UML, DRY, Simple Design, or some other design tools, use-cases will be an extremely valuable help. There is a problem that _may_ crop up with use-case driven development: it does not emphasize testing enough. (My personal opinion, and I don't expect anyone else to buy it right off the bat. Also, it depends on who is doing the use-case driven development, of course.) However, this is not the same thing as saying there is a problem with use-cases. Use-cases are a great tool and in most cases they capture requirements much better than traditional requirement specifications. Personally, I am rather strongly in favour of test driven methodologies, and i consider use-cases an essential tool in my methodology toolkit. > > With Cocoon and XSL I found that most of the architecture is already > provided by the framework itself, meaning that you can focus on the > functionality. The problem of refactoring and reuse manifests itself in > XSLT, though, but it is not nearly as complex to refactor XSLTs as it is > to maintain reusable component-based Java code. > > Anyway, what do you think ? Given XML-pipeline frameworks such as > Cocoon, can we focus on functionality and pay little attention to the > architecture (assume that Cocoon does its job well), or is architecture > still an important part of the methodology ? With the complexity of the applications we make today, architecture is more important than ever. Using a framework of some sort does not reduce the need to pay close attention to the architecture of the code we write ourselves. Messy code written on top of a good framework will result in a bad system
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