Do you like choice?
Mats writes:
Hm… it seems like you don’t like choice?! ... It is up to the architect to select the tools he/she knowns are stable and good.
I do like choice. I think it’s the best part of my work to make these choices and define a working architecture. But I do think it scares away companies thay are looking for a stable platform. Usually making a choice for a platform takes months, and they don’t want to redo it every year. It also means you have to retrain the developers very often, which is expensive.
27 Mar 2003 |
March 28th, 2003 at 1:44 am
If progress goes the way we hope it will, then new technology will make us more and more productive. Example: Object-Relational mapping. A real mess in all projects. I’ve written such code myself. Boring and time consuming. Now there’s OJB, Hibernate, Castor and similar tools out there that makes that part of our apps so much simpler. Sure, it does take more time to evaluate which tool to use, if you haven’t done that evaluation before. But when that choice is taken, you can move on and be really productive. I prefer a two month phase at the beginning of a project when nothing happens except tool evaluation, than to be in an environment (read .Net) where choices are much smaller. You might be off to a quicker start, but with inferior tools. Also, remember, if your architect already know that, say, Hibernate rocks and is good enough, then that tool evaluation phase is null, and you can start producing code as fast as .Net developers, but with superior tools.
Retraining is not an issue, because you wouldn’t pick a new tool unless the training part pays off, compared to sticking around with what you are already using.
I love this boiling soup that the Java community have created, where new open source (often) tools pop up all the time. Being a software developer has never been this great!
May 4th, 2003 at 9:55 am
Nice blog