Hints from the Grey Haired Programmers

I attended a major vendor conference this week. This particular vendor has a a modern line of current modern products, and also a set of 2nd generation mainframe products. They’ve wisely bought a series of smaller product companies over the past decade to ensure their future.

But the old product set continues to live on as well. Yes they’re offering modern interfaces, web service enabling abilities and so forth. And naturally they’re still investing in the original product set, as a cash cow should be milked as long as possible.

One of the speakers I wanted to hear was speaking in the older product set track, so I made my way to that conference area. As I entered it a generational change occurred. EVERYONE, and I mean everyone, was 55 years old or older – with the majority seemingly very very close to retirement.

There’s a clear hint from this sight for those using this product set. We normally think of end of life for a technology as when either support ends or the supporting platform is discontinued. But clearly there are a variety of applications and tools that are tremendously outdated but still in operation.

These products continue as companies have millions invested in their use, customizations, development of code, and all the factors that go into making a system of value to a business.

But while these products may continue to live, there does come a true end of life stage. In the case I’m describing, it clearly seems the knowledge set of this product is literally leaving the industry as the people retire.

While many vendors are quite happy to extend the life of their older and even oldest products forever (for a high support fee), customers would be wise to look that the availability of skilled knowledgeable people to work with them. When the skilled people are reaching the end of their working life, clearly the products have to be replaced. Hopefully before skills availability diminishes to a severe level.

Integration Spaghetti™

I’ve been using the term Integration Spaghetti™ for the past 9 years or so to describe what happens as systems connectivity increases and increases to the point of … unmanageability, indeterminate impact, or just generally a big mess. A standard line of mine is “moving from spaghetti code to spaghetti connections is not an improvement”. (A standard “point to point connection mess” slide, by enterprise architect Jerry Foster from 2001.) In the past few days I’ve been meeting with a series of IT managers at a large customer and have come up with a revised definition for Integration Spaghetti™ : Integration Spaghetti™ is when the connectivity to/from an application is so complex that everyone is afraid of touching it. An application with such spaghetti becomes nearly impossible to replace. Estimates of change impact to the application are frequently wrong by orders of magnitude. Interruption in the integration functioning are always a major disaster – both in terms of th

Solving Integration Chaos - Past Approaches

A U.S. Fortune 50's systems interconnect map for 1 division, "core systems only". Integration patterns began changing 15 years ago. Several early attempts were made to solve the increasing problem of the widening need for integration… Enterprise Java Beans (J2EE / EJB's) attempted to make independent callable codelets. Coupling was too tight, the technology too platform specific. Remote Method Invocation (Java / RMI) attempted to make anything independently callable, but again was too platform specific and a very tightly coupled protocol. Similarly on the Microsoft side, DCOM & COM+ attempted to make anything independently and remotely callable. However, as with RMI the approach was extremely platform and vendor specific, and very tightly coupled. MQ created a reliable independent messaging paradigm, but the cost and complexity of operation made it prohibitive for most projects and all but the largest of Enterprise IT shops which could devote a focused technology

From Spaghetti Code to Spaghetti Connections

Twenty five years ago my boss handed me the primary billing program and described a series of new features needed. The program was about 4 years old and had been worked on by 5 different programmers. It had an original design model, but between all the modifications, bug fixes, patches and quick new features thrown in, the original design pattern was impossible to discern. Any pattern was impossible to discern. It had become, to quote what’s titled the most common architecture pattern of today, ‘a big ball of mud’. After studying the program for several days, I informed my boss the program was untouchable. The effort to make anything more than a minor adjustment carried such a risk, as the impact could only be guessed at, that it was easier and less risky to rewrite it from scratch. If they had considered the future impact, they never would have let a key program degenerate that way. They would have invested the extra effort to maintain it’s design, document it property, and consider

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