The elephant is in the room!
It's a big week for Kevin and I. Our book Eating the It Elephant: Moving from Greenfield Development to Brownfield
is finally available in the US and the UK. It's been eighteen months of hard work from the submission of the proposal of the book to it being real. For a book that talks about re-engineering IT and coping with complexity whilst taking in semantics and business attractors, we've been reassuringly told that its easy to read. My kids even think the cartoons are funny. So if you feel the need to buy a book with a particularly attractive elephant on the cover, ours is the one to go for. If you also happen to work in complex IT environments the contents might be worth reading too!
posted by Richard Hopkins @ 15:43
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2 Comments:
I've just picked up your book. The analogy between developing on top of legacy systems and 'brownfield' development in the construction industry is spot on.
You've created an analogy that I've been struggling to find for a while. The need to survey the site before development is particularly compelling. However, decay in software documentation validity is so rapid, and change in deployed applications so continuous, that any retro codification of existing technical and application infrastructure implementation, beyond the 'fluffy cloud' level, is impractical.
Abstraction of 'constraint' information that had not been explicitly documented (why something can't be done) from information on what has been done is not possible.
And given that your elephant eating machine appears to rely on completeness if not accuracy of the models available, I'm not sure how practical it is without a high level of discipline being present in all previous development efforts in the landscape
I love the 'views' concept, and the rough 'head full' measure of a view's scope. Don't forget that 'heads full' of knowledge also includes 'know who' and people extensively use this to expand their 'view' capability. 'Know who' relationships are complex as they involve trust built through competence and common reference points as well as raw 'white pages' information.
I'm going to work through your book and see how many of the concepts I can apply in my current assignment - I'll let you know how I get on (and you can keep an eye on my blog)
In the meantime, congratulations on a big step forward in maturing the application development and maintenance industry.
Congrats! I stumbled across your book today and will be consuming about as quickly as I can eat an IT elephant. Thank you for sharing your knowledge! FYI: Test your main website in FireFox 3, it's not pretty. ;) --Eric Swanson
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