TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

In today's Postcards from the Revolution entry I addressed risks from project and operational perspectives. For software engineering professionals the MJY Team's Software Risk Management Site is a goldmine of papers and other resources on software risk management. Most of the material is in both HTML and MS Word formats. If you want to see how software project planning should be done you should also see their Project Documents page, which is a real life example of project management best practices.

Earlier I was reading Doug Kaye's weblog and noticed a link to webservices.org. I clicked on the link and was rewarded with a weblog that covers every aspect of web services, and a site that web architects and developers will want to bookmark. While looking around I also discovered Web Services Architect, which nicely complements and augments webservices.org. If you're interested in the topic of web services architecture I recommend Architecting Web Services by William L. Oellermann Jr. and visiting the book's companion web site. Linda reviewed this book on Amazon on December 17, 2001 and I wrote a review on December 13, 2001.

Component-based software engineering is related to web services. This topic is important to me because I work closely with Unmesh Laddha who is the CEO of Thinking Minds, Inc. Unmesh's company has a hybrid business model in that it specializes in component-based software development as well as system integration. Two documents that will be interesting to anyone who works with or is considering components are:

1. Component Evaluation Process
2. Component Assessment Using Specification-Based Analysis and Testing

An excellent book on the topic is Component Based Software Engineering: Putting the Pieces Together (see my review on Amazon dated September 11, 2001 - an easy date to remember).

An excellent source of information for developers and architects, regardless of paradigms, methods or frameworks, is ArsDigita Systems Journal. The stated mission of this publication is to distribute knowledge acquired during the construction and operation of Web-based information systems. Among the resources from the site is SQL for Web Nerds, which is a quick, but complete, overview of SQL. The example environment is Oracle, and it addresses SQL*Plus and PL/SQL. If you need to brush up on either SQL*Plus or PL/SQL I found two 21-lesson tutorials: SQL*Plus and PL/SQL. In addition, there is a well written tutorial titled Introduction to Javascript if you want to get up-to-speed and functional in Javascript programming.

A more complete database resource is Christopher R. Baker's database links that cover Interbase, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL. This site also has an interesting page on open source.

End note: I just discovered a method called aspect-oriented software development, which is a new technology for separation of concerns (SOC) in software evelopment. The techniques of AOSD make it possible to modularize crosscutting aspects of a system. I now have something to occupy me while I learn more about it and determine if it's worthwhile or the method du jour. I'm sure you'll be reading more from me in future entries--good or bad--as my opinions form (and I always have opinions and am not shy about expressing them).