Don't leave reuse to chance
Bob Rhubart's Blog |
April 3, 2007 12:30 PM
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Comments (1)
In a recent post Todd Biske offered this:
When discussing reuse, I always refer back to a presentation I heard at SD East way back in 1998. Unfortunately, I don't recall the speaker, but he had established reuse programs at a variety of enterprises, some successful and some not successful. He indicated that the factor that influenced success the most was marketing. If the groups that had reusable components/services/whatever were able to do an effective job in marketing their goods and getting the word out, the reuse program as a whole would be more successful.
Absolutely right, But he then goes on to say that "focusing in on governance alone still means those service owners are sitting back and waiting for customers to show up."
Not so right. A governance program that leaves reuse to chance isn't much of a governance program.
SOA Governance can --- and should -- include some form of prescriptive reuse. That is, policies should be created that dictate the reuse of specified software assets in specific development projects.
For instance, certain applications, frameworks, or components may be prescribed for use in the development of a Web service. Similarly, selected services may be prescribed for use in the creation of a composite application.
Prescriptive reuse provides a way to ensure that approved, standards and policy-compliant software assets are used in development projects. That process passes the governance gene from the assets to the projects that consume them.
Prescriptive reuse also eliminates the need for developers to search for suitable assets. With the right tools and practices in place, those assets can be delivered directly to the developer.
But practicing prescriptive reuse doesn't mean that promoting and marketing reusable assets isn't also absolutely essential. In his post, Todd mentions several important elements of that marketing effort, all of which, I must point out, are reflected in features of a software asset repository product of which I am particularly familiar.
Comments
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Thanks for your comments on my blog entry Bob. It is certainly true that some assets can be made available prescriptively. I've had experience with making standard development frameworks for an enterprise and the model was to package it as part of the project initiation process, so all the desired assets were already there.
Prescribing service reuse is a more difficult challenge. Effectively, some rules engine must exist that says "if these conditions exist, provide references to this service." There probably is a small set of services for which this could be determined, especially in a very integration-centric environment (i.e. lots of packaged applications or hosted solutions), but for general business services, it may be more difficult. The activities that would indicate that a service is needed are part of the architectural process itself, so we're really not prescribing anything at that point. It is possible, however, and should be encouraged. A second key to reuse is making it the path of least resistance. If this means making things more prescriptive, so be it.
Posted by: biske on April 3, 2007 at 3:04 PM
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