During my first weeks with Day I noticed again the importance of effective communication of IT-Systems architecture and behaviour. Day has various complex tools and frameworks and for new employees or project members it often takes some time to understand the structure and behaviour of the systems and how their part fits into the whole thing. This does not mean that Day has bad documentation, but even with direct contact to core developers it is time consuming to understand complex systems and their environment.
Like every complex system software systems are build by joint efforts of many people who need to collaborate with each other. With people joining and leaving projects continuously it is important to describe the systems in a way that others are able to understand them fast and easily and to know how their part fits in. This requires effective methodologies for describing IT-Systems in order to collaborate effectively.
Because visual notations are often easier to read and understand a series of tools have been developed over the years for modeling - and thus communicating - the structure and behaviour of software systems. Examples are UML, BPMN, FMC or YAWL. Often it is possible to use different tools for modeling the same part of a system. You can model the behaviour of a component by using petri nets or UML state charts for example. The challenge is to select the right tool depending on what you want to communicate and who is your audience.
In the next days I will continue this series with some of my experiences and a set of common tips and tricks for modeling that might help you to model and communicate the structure of your software systems efficiently and thus lowering entry barriers for system understanding.
Some time has passed since my last post. The reason for that was the first project I was involved at Day. But now I will continue with generating some content. First I will tell you about 2 nice tools. As you maybe know, I like the Mac OS X platform for development. Not only because of the nice look&feel, but also because of tools like spotlight and quicksilver which have changed the way I organize and my data and programs. Honestly I do not really organize it since I use a Mac, because the tools do recurring tasks like finding a document or opening a program without any structure.
Beside my Mac I alo have a Window PC. I think it is good to have more one platform for development and testing (and I also enjoy some Windows games in the evening), but I'm really missing some of the cool Mac tools when I work with my Windows PC. Thus I started looking around and found 2 cool tools for Windows. The first is launchy, which provides a quicksilver like application launcher or Windows. It still misses some advanced features like searching address book entries as quicksilver does. But it provides fast launching of application by only using the keyboard as I like it from my Mac and the set of features may grow soon, because it is open source ;-)
The second tool is Aqua Dock that provides an OS X style dock for Windows systems and can help to organize your desktop the Mac way.
OK, obviously these tools do not look as nice as the Mac versions, but usability matters and they can improve your Windows experience and performance.
Most people gather the professional information they need from the web by using search engines like Google. An interesting question that arises from that is: Do professional books die out? I think this will not happen in the next years, because most professionals who write a book do it because they are not willing to give you her knowledge for free and thus they don't share it in the net.
To be honest, I enjoy reading books much more than reading long publication on a monitor. But with books you don't have all the cool feature you as with web resources like bookmarking, sharing, tagging, commenting and so on. The first step towards this problem was done by Amazon when they introduced their recommendation system. This is helpful when you have found an interesting book and want to know what others think about it or what other people bought else. But often you don't know this people and you can't be sure if there opinion might be yours. Additionally I've often seen books at Amazon with multiple recommendations, ranging from 1 to 5 stars. So, what to do in that case?
Recently I came over the new Google book search, which has a nice feature called my library. Here you can add books you have read, label it with tags and stars and write reviews. I think this can help, because that way you can find out what books the people read you know and trust (if they use it). I started adding some of the best books I have read to my library.