Eating the It Elephant or Microsoft Windows XP Professional Resource Kit

Eating the IT Elephant: Moving from Greenfield Development to Brownfield

Author: Richard Hopkins

Most conventional approaches to IT development assume that you're building entirely new systems. Today, "Greenfield" development is a rarity. Nearly every project exists in the context of existing, complex system landscapes—often poorly documented and poorly understood. Now, two of IBM's most experienced senior architects offer a new approach that is fully optimized for the unique realities of "Brownfield" development.

Richard hopkins and Kevin Jenkins explain why accumulated business and IT complexity is the root cause of a large-scale project failure and show how to overcome that complexity "one bite of the elephant at a time." You'll learn how to manage every phase of the Brownfield project, leveraging breakthrough collaboration, communication, and visualization tools—including Web 2.0, semantic software engineering, model-driven development and architechture, and even virtual worlds.

This book will help you reengineer new flexibility and agility into your IT environment...integrate more effectively with partners...prepare for emerging business challenges...improve system reuse and value...reduce project failure rates...meet any business or IT challenge that requires the evolution of transformation of legacy systems.

• System complexity: understand it, and harness it

Go beyond the comforting illusion of your high-level architecture diagrams

• How conventional development techniques actually make things worse

Why traditional decomposition and abstraction don't work—and what to do instead

• Reliably reengineer your IT in line with your business priorities

New ways to understand, communicate, visualize, collaborate, and solve complex IT problems

• Cut the elephant down to size, one step at a time

Master all four phases of a Brownfield project: survey, engineer, accept, and deploy

Table of Contents:

Foreword   Grady Booch     xv
Foreword   Chris Winter     xvii
Preface     xxi
Acknowledgments     xvii
About the Authors     xxix
Introducing Brownfield     1
Eating Elephants Is Difficult     3
Today's Delivery Methods     4
Why Do Big Projects Fail?     5
Environmental Complexity     13
Brownfield Sites Must Be Surveyed     20
The Confusion of Tongues     23
Introducing Brownfield     25
Key Communication Problems     25
Overcoming Communication Complexity     34
Big-Mouthed Superhero Required     37
Elephant-Eating Strategies     39
Consuming the Environment     41
Architecting the Elephant Eater     48
The Elephant Eater in Action     55
The Brownfield Beliefs     60
The Trunk Road to the Brain     65
Alternative Wallpapers     66
Invading Hilbert Space     72
Architecture Is the Solution     75
Bridging the Business/IT Gap     79
The Mythical Metaman     89
When You Eliminate the Impossible     91
The Long Tail of Business Services     98
Business Attractors for Attractive Businesses     104
The Death of Brownfield     105
The Elephant Eater     107
Abstraction Works Only in a Perfect World     109
Considerations for an Elephant Eater     110
Systems Integration and Engineering Techniques     112
Abstraction Is the Heart of Architecture     118
Do We Need a Grand Unified Tool?     128
The Connoisseur's Guide to Eating Elephants     129
Evolution of the Elephant Eater     133
The Sources of Brownfield     134
Isn't This CASE?     138
Isn't This MDA?     139
Brownfield Development     143
Agile Waterfalls     144
The Brownfield Development Approach     158
Inside the Elephant Eater     165
Looking Inside the Elephant Eater     166
Parse View and Identify Patterns     169
Merge Views     183
Create Transforms     197
Generate Artifacts     198
Test Artifacts and 5.1a: Identify Generation Faults     199
Add and Update Information     199
A Portrait of an Elephant Eater      200
Elephant Eater at Work     203
Making the Move to Brownfield     204
Taking the First Step     207
A Better Way to Build Interfaces     207
A Better Way to Build an Enterprise Service Bus     209
The End of Middleware?     211
Evolving a Deployable Enterprise Architecture     212
Index     215

New interesting textbook: From Modernization to Globalization or Public Speaking

Microsoft Windows XP Professional Resource Kit

Author: Microsoft Press Staff

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