Cingular and flexible design.
Last time when we discussed Joels article about his poor experience and critics of Telecom companies management, the discussion turned somewhat to political debate.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.346232.0
I would like to continue the conversation rather on more technical topic.
Everyone will agree that the customer satisfaction is the very important indicator when we evaluate B2C corporate applications. What we would expect from Joel is the analysis and some propositions.
He analyzed the situation, and his werdict seems to be: outsoursing and heterogenious design are two main sources of malfunction.
Thank you Joel for strategic consulting, but How am I supposed to adress these points?
Should we look for in-source everything and doing a monolithic system as mainframes used to be?
Should we arbitrate between robust centralized design and
A) Ability to frequently change something that has a big inertia
B) Possibility to use the best products and companies available for fulfilling customers and corporate needs?
I would say that the flexibility, the aproach to build heterogeneous systems that can be interfaced with each other with more or less success is a next step on the way of rising productivity in the IT field.
Do you remember Frederic Brooks who was looking for a possibility to multiply the productivity by 10? In the second edition of “The Mythical Man Month», he wrote something that I really appreciate. He has been speaking about encapsulation. He confessed, “Holub was right I was wrong”. Then he said that the encapsulation is probably the mean to grow the productivity by factor of 10.
What seemes to arize that these complex architectures that are, for sure, not always smooth and perfect are much more efficient that a monolithic in-source system could be at the similar cost.
About his personal problem with exception: I think that if these exceptions arise quite frequently, people at Cingular are going to fix it. If not, Joel just got no luck to be only one customer, of no importance. I’ts about triage.
In the other hand, people at Cingular were able to add these two lines manually, and it solved Joels issue.
At the end, I would think that process of emerging the best exists in Telecom corporations. Some strategic decisions are often taken by competent people.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.350152.0