Systemic Requirements Non-functional requirements, system constraints and qualities, systemic requirements. Whatever you call them, here they are.

Solution Maturity Design, or Technical, Debt is receiving growing acceptance in the development community as a useful and practical metaphor. This article shows how it can be used as a measure of solution maturity at the enterprise level in corporate environments.

Make room for Functional Programming 2 The second of two parts explaining the main concepts of functional programming: this time through a worked example.

Make room for Functional Programming 1 The first of a two-part article explaining all the main concepts of functional programming: from lambda functions, to closures, to continuations, to monads.

Dancing with the Reuse Fairy This is the story of the software reuse fairy. She comes and goes, seducing some, and annoying others. She is real, but there are good reasons not to believe.

Embracing the Third Way There’s still too much fervour around open source vs commercial software. One isn’t better than the other, and both are here to stay. Harmony lies not with the communities, but with the users and IT leaders who need to accept their responsibilities to make both prosper.

10 Reasons Change is an Antipattern Everybody’s talking about change: Change Programmes, Embracing Change, Championing Change. Here are ten reasons you might want to avoid change and just improve instead.

Strategy for the Irretrievably Pragmatic Strategy has a bad name with some, being seen as the preserve of talking shops and consultants. But a good strategy, well-applied, can be the making of a company. It’s not possible to say what the right strategy is for all businesses, but there are some good rules for applying it. This article looks at why the most pragmatic people are often the best creators of strategy and how it’s as much about bottom-up thinking as it is about future vision. ...

The ABC of the ESB IT people must be some of the cleverest and expensive in the world. Or at least that the theory. And yet we are constantly falling for the emperors new clothes in the form of next-big-things whilst discarding what we have, even the bits of what we have that work. The answer lies in understanding the history of how we got to where we got to and, unfortunately, accepting that some things are hard work and we have to do it. ...

Magnificence in the Mundane Relationships between IT departments and business customers are not unlike real world friendships. If you can see what works with your friends you can apply it in business. And it’s mostly about conversations. If you can talk, you have a good chance of resolving anything. As professionals in a complex subject area it’s always tempting to look for sophisticated answers to problems, but by focusing on the common sense basics of how we structure ourselves and how we act we can deliver better software. When we do that we cease to be something distinct from the business and we can stop talking about business/IT alignment and get on with doing what we do best. ...