Written by Chris Chedgey, February 23rd, 2010
An often overlooked extension to Structure101 is the “Headless” mode of operation. This lets you hook s101 into your nightly build so that it checks for things like newly introduced complexity or architectural rules being violated while you sleep. You specify what you want checked, and whether you want to break the build or just receive a warning.
Eran Harel (“Code Slut”) has blogged how he uses this in Orbitz.
Written by Chris Chedgey, August 14th, 2007
A lot of work went into this. A "periodic table" of visualization methods for data, information, concepts, strategy, metaphors, process and structure.
Here’s a screen shot – be sure and visit the original if you’re interested – when you mouse over each cell, you get an example of the corresponding visualization method.
I didn’t see any of the visualization techniques used by structure101 for visualizing software dependencies and architectural layers. It is more focused on business processes, though Data Flow (Df), Entity-relationship (E) and Flowchart (Fl) diagrams are there.
Written by Chris Chedgey, August 22nd, 2006
The Gartner "Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle" is something worth giving a good once-over every year. The premise is that most technologies that eventually get traction will first go through a "Peak of Inflated Expectations" with lots of publicity and a lot of unsuccessful applications by the early adopters. This is followed by the "Trough of Disillusionment" (got to love these terms!) where the bad experiences cause bad press. The "Slope of Enlightenment" is a quiet period during which the technology is not much talked about, but experimentation continues and the best applications are discovered. Finally the implementations stabilize and the advantages become accepted during the "Plateau of Productivity".
There are 2 important aspects for a technology – where it is on the curve, and how fast it’s moving.
Here is this year’s:
Get the full summary from Gartner here.
Written by Chris Chedgey, August 13th, 2006
I happen to know that there exists people that have not yet set themselves up with a blog aggregator – mostly these are guys that already know everything, plus they haven’t lifted their noses out of their IDE since RSS was invented (hi Ian!). Luckily these guys have mostly discovered email, and now there’s R-Mail – just give it the RSS feed and your email and get your ass back to that late project already! I like this a lot. Rather than the pointless "hey, Ian, you should watch this blog", I can subscribe on his behalf and there’s no need for the "conversation".
Written by Chris Chedgey, July 03rd, 2006
If you like a heavy dose of “context” check out the seminars from the Long Now Foundation.
I just returned from an extremely enjoyable 2 week vacation in Nerja in the south of Spain (thanks Joe for the recommendation).
But as a complete talk-radio addict, I was more than a tad concerned before I departed as to how I would survive without hearing John Humphreys on the BBC Radio 4 Today program savaging the poor beleaguered minister de jour each morning (sad, I know). How could I sleep without the World Service assuring me that even though the world was going to hell in a hand basket, at least I knew how, where and why? Basically, I get existential angst if I’m force to go without a focus for more than a few minutes (“Quick! Do something! I’m starting to think! [Homer Jay Simson]) …
As luck would have it, I bumped into Eamonn de Leastar, co-founder of the amazingly successful research group, the TSSG. He put me on to the Long Now Foundation. They have the humble goal to understand the factors that will affect the world in the next 10,000 years. They’ve done wacky stuff like built a 10,000 year clock, but mostly they have monthly seminars with seriously credible presenters that are given a full hour on how their area of specialty can impact our ability to survive in the Long Now. Then there’s Q and A from an enthusiastic San Francisco audience – truly great stuff!
You can download the lot onto your MP3 player. Totally put the gravy on my holiday cake.
Written by Chris Chedgey, May 16th, 2006
I just heard through an OMG mailing list that the 2 main techies (and presumably the founders) at Klocwork are leaving the company. Klocwork are a Canadian company that started off tackling a similar problem to Headway, and spent even more VC money than us drifting from one positioning to another. They seem to have rested for a while on "software security", though their home page mentions a half dozen other themes.
I empathize with the Klocworks marketing team in their efforts to find the "right" positioning for this kind of stuff. Software structure can help with Developer Productivity and Code Browsing and Software Quality and Software Defect Detection and probably even Software Security. That’s why Headway just went with Software Structure. We’ll keep producing the best products for seeing, understanding, measuring, modifying and controlling Software Structure and let our customers figure out what to do with it.
Anyway, Djenana Campara (CTO) and Nikolai Mansurov (Chief Architect, I think) invested surprising amounts of effort (given the company’s positioning) creating the Knowledge-Driven Modernization (KDM) task force in the OMG. Now we know why – the married couple have found a new nest – KDM Analytics. Guys, I wish you the very best, and keep the dream alive!
Written by Chris Chedgey, March 20th, 2006
Welcome to my new weblog. I intend this to be mostly about the stuff we do at Headway, though I’m sure to digress occasionally.
At Headway, we go on a bit about structural patterns we call Fat and Tangles (much more on these later), and those that have met me will understand why I considered calling the blog something like fatbuttanglefree. However, while I’m pretty sure I’ll never again suffer the scourge of tangles, I live in hope that my weight may change favorably one day. So nomoretangles it is.
