Skip to main content

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 the impact of quick changes.

Nowadays a similar pattern is happening in many IT shops with integration. It starts with “just” connecting a system or two. Technology, methodology, and architecture is not considered – after all it’s just a connection or two. After a few years, that IT shop is faced with tens to hundreds of connections via all kinds of different connection technologies (and gateways), a wide variety of data formats, limited or no reuse of connections, and a systems integration infrastructure that looks like a plate of spaghetti!

Minor changes to one system begin impacting multiple other systems. Slowdowns of one database cause impact throughout the environment, even impacting systems seemingly with no relation to the database involved.

The accidental integration architecture begins to rear its ugly head.

Figure 1 represents a key business system at a US Fortune 50 IT organization that grew, in an unplanned fashion, into a highly integrated system. Systems stability degraded tremendously, and system agility became an impossibility.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

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 disast...
Read more

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...
Read more