Microservices Q&A

In September I will run a masterclass on microservices at Luxoft in Moscow, Russia, see www.luxoft-training.ru/master-class/sander. In preparation of this masterclass, here’s a short Q & A on microservices. Is it worth applying microservices? Q: In your article Microservices. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly you described different aspects of development. Readers may think that using a microservices architecture […]

Microservices. The good, the bad and the ugly

Back in 1988, when I was first employed by a company for writing software, the world was fairly simple. The development environment we had was character-based, the database was integrated and traversed with cursors, and we built a whole new administrative system covering everything but the kitchen sink. It took us five years to complete the project, basically because the […]

A book on pragmatic software architecture, patterns and frameworks?

One of the major items on my wish list – that is on the professional half of it – is to write a book that displays my ideas on software architecture, patterns and frameworks. Yes I know, there are many books on software architecture, and there are many books that explain patterns, and yes there also are a lot of […]

November 12, 2010 – Microsoft TechEd Europe. How smart use cases can drive web development

[Session ARC205 at Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin] Use cases have been around for many years describing the requirements of software development projects. From a developer’s point of view, use cases are often seen as too abstract and too complex to develop code from. Until now, that is. During this interactive talk, speaker Sander Hoogendoorn will demonstrate how to […]

A recipe for enterprise agile. Mixing Scrum and Smart

To cut to the chase, those of you who have worked on enterprise or service oriented projects before already know this. These types of projects are characterized by a large number of organizational, functional and technically complicating factors. Enterprise software development projects are surrounded by a large number of complicating characteristics and challenges: Many different stakeholders. Projects have many different […]

Being Smart in enterprise agile

As agile is becoming more and more mainstream, organization are starting to do enterprise software development project using well-known but fairly basic lightweight agile processes.   In many projects this has lead to surprisingly bad result, baffling the agile Certified Pokémon Trainers who are coaching these projects. The presentation below shows a number of accelerators or technique that projects can […]

PowerPoint Architecture

It’s a mildly sunny April morning in 2002 when I park my car outside of a huge government agency office in a small suburban city near Utrecht. I am invited for a brainstorm session with the agency’s enterprise architects. Although I do not consider myself an enterprise architect, and explained that upfront, they were eager to discuss their architecture with […]

Smart use case stereotypes in service oriented projects

Smart use cases are a great technique for specifying standardized requirements in many types of projects. Over the past few years we have smart use cases being modeled and written in projects using Java and .NET, as you might expect, but also in Sharepoint projects, business intelligence, service oriented projects and even SAP implementations. Stereotypes drive standardization Standardization of your […]

December 1, 2009. Talk “An introduction to agile SAP SOA”

Customer presentation, Eindhoven. After Twan van den Broek (of Ciber) and I succesfully applied a great mix of agile software development processes and techniques, including Scrum, Smart, smart use cases, smart estimation in probably the first agile SAP SOA projects in the Netherlands, we’ve held several talks on the subject at conferences and seminars, including an agile conference, the SOA […]

Identifying services we might need in the future but don’t know right now?

Earlier this week I attended the Landelijk Architectuur  Congres in Nieuwegein. Besides the noteworthy percentage of attendees with mustaches, grey hair and ties, a pleasant and friendly event. In the afternoon of the first day of the event I did a lively talk on shaping service oriented projects using smart use cases. During the talk I recevied some very peculiar […]

Landelijk Architectuur Congres (Nieuwegein, Netherlands. November 2009)

Shaping service oriented projects using smart use cases Landelijk Architectuur Congres 2009, NBC Nieuwegein. As a consequence of a succesful duo-talk at the Integrate Agile conference in the spring, Twan van den Broek (of Ciber) and I where invited to present the same material at the Landelijk Architectuur Congres (LAC 2009), however split into two separate talks. Twan will focus […]

Service georienteerde projecten vormgeven met smart use cases [In Dutch]

This post was originally written to be published as a chapter in an upcoming book on IT architecture. The book will be presented at the Landelijk Architectuur Congres 2009 in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. This post will likely also be published in two parts in Software Release Magazine. Ondanks dat ik inmiddels al zo’n twintig jaar in dit vakgebied rondloop, blijven […]

Serviceorientatie vormgeven met smart use cases [In Dutch]

This post was originally written to be published as a chapter in an upcoming book on IT architecture. The book will be presented at the Landelijk Architectuur Congres 2009 in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. This post will likely also be published in two parts in Software Release Magazine. Ondanks dat ik inmiddels al zo’n twintig jaar in dit vakgebied rondloop, blijven […]

International SOA Symposium (Rotterdam, Netherlands. October 2009)

International SOA Symposium, World Trade Center, Rotterdam. (www.soasymposium.com) On October 22 and 23, 2009 the second international SOA Symposium will take place at the World Trade Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Just coming out of a highly successful agile SAP service oriented project (likely the first in it’s type in the Netherlands or even a wider area), Twan van den […]

October 22, 2009. Talk. “Mission impossible? Applying Agile to the World of SOA and ERP”

International SOA Symposium, World Trade Center, Rotterdam. (www.soasymposium.com) On October 22 and 23, 2009 the second international SOA Symposium will take place at the World Trade Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Just coming out of a highly successful agile SAP service oriented project (likely the first in it’s type in the Netherlands or even a wider area), Twan van den […]

SDC (Arnhem, Netherlands. October 2009)

Shaping service oriented projects using smart use cases SDC Conference, Papendal, Arnhem (www.sdc.nl) Next week the annual SDC conference will take place at Papendal, Arnhem. As usual the organising SDN community has put together a long list of international appraised speakers, and challenging subjects on the matter of software development and software architecture. A bit to my surprise, this year […]

Hilversum, The Netherlands. September 30 – October 1, 2009. Workshop pragmatic modelling with UML (Array Seminars)

Array Seminars, Amrâth Hotel Lapershoek, Hilversum I will present an intense two day workshop in Hilversum that follows the pragmatic modeling approach presented in my book with the same title. During this highly interactive workshop participants will learn how the various modeling techniques from UML and beyond connect. Learn everything about (smart) use cases and start working directly with UML […]

Pragmatic model driven development. Part II. A pragmatic approach

  Note. This series of posts is also published as a Capgemini group white paper and published in Software Release Magazine (in Dutch, in two parts). In projects that are executed using the Accelerated Delivery Platform, Capgemini’s open knowledge platform for agile software development, a lightweight, pragmatic approach to model driven development is used. This approach can be expressed in […]

Pragmatic model driven development. Part I. Code generation scenario’s

Note. This series of posts is also published as a Capgemini group white paper and published in Software Release Magazine (in Dutch, in two parts). With the economy at a low point in time, organizations and project are clearly resetting their goals. Long term multimillion projects are being halted, in favor of short, agile projects, with feasible goals and good […]

Checking for reusable services using smart use cases

In any project, and especially in projects that run under a tight schedule – as most projects do these days, it is helpful to list all elements that can possibly be (re)used to crank up your project, such as guidelines, documentation templates, existing components, (web) services, frameworks. This can best be done early on in the project, traditional or agile. […]

Client/service architecture. Domain driven development in the distributed era. Episode IV

Go to episode three. Go to episode two. Go to episode one. In case you’re wondering why doesn’t this dude come to his point, you’ve probably missed it. I’ve made it already. The point is: you should always have a single point of truth, and at most have it reproduced on the server side. Which in most cases you don’t […]

Single point of truth. Domain driven development in the distributed era. Episode III

Go to episode two Go to episode one Client / server could have been a much more successful era in software development, if it wasn’t for this copy-and-paste programming, leading to applications that slowly became unmanageable. I have seen this anti-pattern occur in any of the popular client / server technologies. Without exception, whether it was Visual Basic, PowerBuilder or […]

The merits of two-tier architecture. Domain driven development in the distributed era. Episode II

Go to episode one. So now you’re stuck with this two-tier architecture. Is this a problem. Well, not yet. However, it can become a huge problem, and it has become a huge problem in many, many client / server applications, in a vide variety of technologies, including several types of (legacy) web application technologies. The truth is out there The […]

Back in the days of client/server. Domain driven development in the distributed era. Episode I

At this point in time, where we slowly shift from service orientation to cloud computing, building business software is more complicated then it has ever been. There are many platform that your software needs to target, and there are even more ways of writing the software. Beyond choosing technology Choosing a technology goes way beyond stating that you are doing […]

So much to write, so little time

It’s too bad there’s only 24 hours in a day. There are so many ideas in my head that I still have to write down, that I have to make a (short) list now to keep my head from exploding. So here it is: White paper on how to do agile SAP projects using smart use cases. Article on applying […]

Increasing the productivity of software development

Earlier this week I presented a talk at the inspiring Software Developers Conference 2008 in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands. My talk had an inspiring, or at least intriguing title: How to keep our jobs. Why? Well, let me share some thoughts on the productivity of software development projects. A 100-fold Recent research by Gartner shows that the productivity of software development […]