Technology Evolutionary Database Design And Enterprise Architecture Aplication

The past 2 years or more has seen a proliferation of continuous integration tools and platforms leading to substantial innovation in the build and release space. Distribution of builds is one such innovation and yet another is the way in which builds are now structured to make greater use of automation in various stages of the build. Build pipelines help to provide greater insight into the quality of each build and the environments to which they have been deployed. A natural expansion of the build pipeline meme is the adoption of continuous deployment techniques, where the intention is to extend the build pipeline into the production environment.

This relies on automated deployment techniques and authorization mechanisms built into the continuous integration toolset. One of the key benefits is the ability to move new functionality into production rapidly and reliably We assist many of our clients in adapting enterprise software architecture practices to fit within an Agile software delivery approach. In the past year we have seen increased interest in evolutionary enterprise architecture and how service oriented architectures shape the boundaries between enterprise units. The value of an evolutionary approach to enterprise architecture is the creation of lighter weight systems that ease integration between disparate parts.

By embracing this approach and the notion of the web as an enterprise application platform, we have reduced overall complexity of application architectures, increased quality and scalability, and reduced development costs. The industry has seen significant changes to the way we use and store data over the past few years. Agile development practices have lead to greater emphasis on evolutionary database design, requiring new tools that support migration of schemas in line with changes to the domain model of an application. As storage space consistently becomes cheaper and data access speeds increase, many organizations are investigating the use of multiple schemas to hold data for different purposes, e.g. transactional and analysis schemas.

Incremental data warehousing is becoming increasingly popular as the cost of moving data between a transactional data store and an analysis environment is less than the value of having access to near real-time
reporting of critical business data. As Agile practices move further toward mainstream adoption, we see significant benefits from the adoption of Lean software development practices as well. These practices have their roots in the Toyota Production System and complement much of our understanding of Agile software development to date. One topic that Lean has also given us greater insight into is that of set-based design. Set-based design leads us to implement similar solutions at the same time while the cost of doing so is constrained. This leads us into the area of emergent design and the ability to let experience shape our design decisions and defer key decisions until the last responsible moment.

The benefits of user-centered design are often understated. Gaining a broader understanding of data flows and users’ goals simplify the overall architecture of a system while optimizing user interaction. In the past year we have seen a greater uptake of user-centered design in Agile software development practices as experts in both fields have established new ways of working together.