Frank Carver's Punch Barrel

A “workflow engine” is becoming the new must-have for enterprise system development. In days gone by it might have been an automatic choice to go for an expert system, Enterprise Service Bus, messaging infrastructure or big-ticket database, but those now seem a little bit passé.

There are several commercial workflow engines available, and a whole bunch of open source ones. Here’s a list of workflow engines written in Java, for example.

Boris Lublinsky has written an article at InfoQ expressing the strong opinion that writing your own workflow engine should not be an option.

I’m not sure I completely agree. For me the most telling part of the article appears near the end:

People today rarely implement their own database or O/R mapper or application server. Why is it often that people think that they should write their own workflow engine?

As it happens, I have implemented my own database, O/R mapper and application server, and found the experience invaluable in understanding the challenges and important features of such software. Writing a workflow engine would presumably be a similarly valuable lesson.

I have seen several attempts to implement an agile approach to software development within large organizations, and in many  (if not all) of those cases the end result has not been very compelling. This is in direct contrast to agile adoption in smaller, typically single-team, companies.

It’s natural enough to assume that problems with implementing agile processes in large organizations stem from some characteristic of the organizations themselves. Amr Elssamadisy, however, has a different suggestion. Perhaps some of the problems stem from the use of external agile “coaches”, and the way that they affect the way both the agile team and the organization operates simply by being there.

Read more at: InfoQ: Opinion: Agile Coaches Frequently a Source of Adoption Problems.

A thoughtful article on how attempts to provide a universal user interface typically create more problems than they solve.

Unqualified Reservations: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces.