Software Configuration Management

Defining "Who sees what" and "who does what" are the two important aspects of access control in any software application. "Security" is a much larger subject, but this article focuses on just the access control aspects of security in a software application. The Older Paradigm: Roles and Page-Level Access Controls When you build a custom application for a specific customer, the access control policies of the organization are often defined upfront as part of the requirements phase. Depending on the vertical, domain and the specific organizational structure of the business, first the roles are defined. And then each role is given access to a set of screens, forms, pages and reports. What role A sees might be different from what role B sees. What role A can do could be different from what role B is allowed to do. Of course, certain areas in the application can be accessed... (more)

Why Activity Streams Matter for Manufacturing Software

These days, activity streams seem to be popping up everywhere in enterprise tech as vendors rush to add social features to their software. Twitter and Facebook-like streams are even starting to gain traction in manufacturing software. Two of the most prominent examples of vendors incorporating activity stream data into their manufacturing user interface (UI) are cloud enterprise resource planning vendors Kenandy and NetSuite. Incorporating activity stream data into manufacturing software UIs has important implications for collaboration manufacturing environments. For instance, i... (more)

Be Nice and Share - Ten Tips for the Shared Services Team

Sharing software and services across teams poses many challenges. At the minimum, each team will have its own agenda and release schedule and will be largely unaware of each other's day-to-day work. Sharing becomes even more difficult in cases when the teams are geographically separated from each other or when they work for different companies. In this article I will go over communication, automated builds, testing, documentation and other topics to facilitate the sharing of code and services. Background My younger son received a new football for Christmas. Soon enough I heard th... (more)

Twelve Essential Skills for Software Architects

The two things I like least about being a software architect is doing documentation and exercising social soft skills. On a lot of projects there comes a time when there is nothing I want to do more than explain to a business user why they are wrong. Dead wrong. We all know that does not fair well with the egos most business users have, and does not fair well with your potential future on the given project. This book contains will show you how to use different skills to help you graciously handle the harder conversations. This book is broken into three sections which cover, relat... (more)

Book Review: Software Architecture

This book is truly a holistic view of software architecture. This book structures the book around an Architecture Orientation Framework. The framework is based on open question words. A chapter has been dedicate to each. The framework provides a nice common vocabulary that makes team communication easier. The chapters of the book include Architectures and Architecture Disciplines (WHAT), Architecture Perspectives (WHERE)' Architecture Requirements (WHY), Architecture Means (WITH WHAT), Organizations and Individuals (WHO), and Architecture Method (HOW). Each chapter is laid out in t... (more)