What are Dynamic Applications?

It's the software-way of putting the business people back in charge. Today, changes to enterprise business software takes ages to get into production. Endless analyze-redesign-implement-test-deploy cycles affecting multiple stakeholders: IT, QA, vendors and of course the sponsor.

How would it feel if the first three stakeholders could be removed from the process, once the application has been finalized in its initial state? How about giving the sponsor or business department the ability to adapt and change applications on their own? How about giving them the ability to change complex business logic, fine-tune parameters and model work flow to reflect the reality when and as soon as it changes?

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With Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood has one of the best programming blogs ever. Yesterday he blogged about The Atwood System of Real Ultimate Programming Power, which I find so great that I need to repeat it here, for the sake of marketing:

DRY

KISS

YAGNI

I would really like to inspire my collegues. I want them to read blogs, to read programming books, to improve themselves all the time. Some of my team's members are doing this. Some don't. And as Jeff wrote, the guys who really need improvement are not the ones reading blogs at all. They just don't care.

Late Friday evening, just before Kai and me went off to get some beers in Markdorf, another team's member told me that his day had gone really bad. He wanted to do a pre-release for his customer and the day ("Freitag 13.") seems to have put all kinds of strange errors on his way. Like Maven not resolving dependencies, Hudson not building for two days, ActiveMQ losing connections etc. I was shocked that he didn't try to find the root cause of his problems and fix them (like learning how to control Maven and do real releases, instead of pretending to do releases and just do it manually), but he put in most of his effort to work around the problems. Fixing symptoms never helps.

He spent hours to work around all kinds of errors, instead of fixing his release process and to get it right once and for all. I bet that his team will have the same problems on the next release anyway and that they'll start crying at Maven all over again. Just for the sake of "I don't care how this complex software engineering thingy is supposed to work, i just want to get my crappy code packaged somehow so I can send it to the customer, forget about it and get home asap."

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