Sunday, December 14, 2003

Sorry, we still need programmers...

This kind of thinking is just plain silly:
"In theory, because composite applications use software components, they can be built by a trained business analyst rather than require the services of a full-fledged programmer. "Just as you don't need to know how a Web browser works to create a Web page," says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, "you won't need to know how one software actually interfaces with another to build a composite application."

People, we are so far off from this concept... where business analysts do some magic stuff and software pops out the other side.

These kind of comments are dangerous... they just make us look like bozo's that over promised and under-delivered. We are moving into an age of contract based development, not "miracle-based development". For some period of time the complexity of putting together service oriented software will INCREASE not DECREASE. We are trading reusability and agility for a decrease in performance and increased complexity. Programming a distributed, heterogeneous web service stack with business logic spread across the network isn't simple. Adding a set of 20+ new specifications won't make life easier either.

Business analysts will create business cases.
Process analysts will create better processes.
Architects will divide up the problem.
Service analysts will encapsulate the problem into small components.
Platform coders will program them.
Orchestration designers will tie the services back together.

No magic, just good ol'fashion hard work from a variety of specialists. Hey, I look forward to the day when 'Service Oriented BPM' is here too. I'm working on it - my competitors are working on it, but promising it now is not in our best interest.

No comments: