Thank You, Brent Carlson

Putting Web Services in a Business Context

Best Practices for Software Development Asset Reuse

Tuesday July 13, 2004

Brent Carlson
LogicLibrary

 Read his Presentation Slides (Adobe Acrobat)

Reported by Jeff Gross
Speaking from extensive real-world experience in framework design and refactoring, Brent Carlson, VP of Technology at LogicLibrary, presented Best Practices in Software Reuse.
His talk addressed the architectural considerations and processes that allow a software development organization to categorize existing and future software development assets (SDA's) to maximize their reuse potential.

Service Oriented Architectures, in particular, with their emphasis on coarse-grained workflow assembly, benefit dramatically from a reuse methodology. A major success factor is to avoid redundancy and ensure alignment with both business and technical contexts. Brent concluded by building the case for a metadata-driven repository approach to SDA management that integrates tightly with .NET or J2EE IDE frameworks.

The COOUG audience responded with interest to some of the examples that calculated ROI around reuse. A discussion of cultural inhibitors to software reuse -- illustrated by actual project experiences of the COOUG members, most of them cautionary -- showed that management issues can be just as important for successful reuse as the technical details.

Knowing what assets exists and where they are located is only part of the equations. Understanding how each asset fits into the corporate business landscape is the key to efficient development. With a catalog of essential software development assets (SDAs) mapped to your architectures and models, you locate the most appropriate software assets, employ these assets in your tools of choice to develop web services, and feed the resulting web services back into your catalog for future use.

Brent Carlson is vice president of technology and co-founder of LogicLibrary, and is a 17-year veteran of IBM, where he held numerous leadership roles on the "IBM SanFrancisco Project"--a consortium of more than 100 companies united by the mission of providing a framework for Java-based application business components. Carlson is the co-author of two books: SanFrancisco Design Patterns: Blueprints for Business Software (with James Carey and Tim Graser) and Framework Process Patterns: Lessons Learned Developing Application Frameworks (with James Carey). He also holds 16 software patents, with eight more currently under evaluation.

We gave away  four copies of Mr. Carlson's book "Framework Process Patterns", above, plus the following three books courtesy Addison Wesley:

                   

Plus the following book courtesy Prentice-Hall/PTR:













 Reported by Terry McAuliffe