Tag Archives: Software Engineering

Story Mapping – So Easy a 7th Grader Can Do It

Grooming the Story Map

Building out and Grooming a Story Map

As she was thinking about how the user interaction would go, I explained that we needed to capture this somewhere so we could make it her 7th grade project. When we returned home, I was messing around with upgrading Parallels on my Mac when she walked up with Blue Tape, Post-Its, and a Sharpie. She simply asked, “How do I do this?”

Off to the races we went.

In explaining the story wall, I never used terms that were techie, geeky or anything but the language she was using. The result was she came up with a term called “a Story Map”. I have to believe she has heard me use that before, but I am most definite she has never seen one. I just asked two questions over and over:

  1. If you were playing the game, what would you do?
  2. What would happen as a result?

Those are two key ingredients for a Story Map.

All too often I spend hours and days un-teaching decades of “software engineering analysis and design” just to get to the basic two questions for starting a software engineering endeavor. I wonder why a 7th Grader can figure this stuff out in 15 minutes and adult professionals with four years of formal education, and typically two to seven years or more of professional experience can’t “get it”?

Are we such creatures of habit that our former experiences render us incapable of thinking about “HOW TO THINK” about a problem? I’m beginning to wonder. I feel another human behavior experiment coming on.

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Building Scalable Web-Based Applications

Twitter is over capacity

Twitter is over capacity

Scalable web-based applications has got a lot of air-play on social networks like Twitter lately, mostly because Twitter has been overcome by scalability issues and the service unreliable. Having an unreliable internet service is embarrassing and unacceptable. There is no better way to kill your brand image than to have your viral social media strategy fall flat on its face in front of the “instant on” world.

Having said that, I’ve had a lot of requests for guidance on how to build scalable web-based applications that can withstand getting Slashdotted. Building a scalable web-based application can happen incrementally so you don’t have to apply all the principles below all at once. There is an appropriate implementation roadmap that is appropriate for different types of web-based applications. For example, if your site is proving an web-service API (SOAP service) for other web-services or client applications, you should spend time looking at capacity planning for those services with less emphasis on your own public facing web-site. Anyway… here is my brain dump. There is more where this came from.

Application architecture

  • Judicious use of the singleton pattern
  • Judicious Use of the Concurrency pattern
  • Client side form validation
  • Use of AJAX for web-services requests
  • Caching of semi-dynamic data (pre-rendering semi-static pages)
  • Use of MVC pattern
  • Object persistence is separated from the object
  • Use of XML and meta-data instead of traditional row/column SQL commands for each data element
  • Place SOAP interfaces on a separate cluster of servers (aka application servers)

System architecture

  • Use a load-balancer and multiple Web servers
  • Separate your web-application into a minimum of four tiers: UI, Application Services, Object Persistence Layer, Database Services
  • Use a separate NIC on each server and switch for each tier of the application (e.g. web-page server to application server, application server to object persistence server, and object persistence server to database server)
  • Use a load balancer between each tier of of the application (e.g. between web-page servers and application servers, between application servers and object persistence servers, etc.)
  • Use an enterprise service bus object persistence service to make sure object concurrency issues are handled across multiple databases
  • Use clusters of virtualized servers running across multiple physical servers
  • Add performance monitoring services on each virtualized server to check memory, network, harddrive and application utilization
  • Conduct performance tests to determine if any one object needs more server resources, and move those objects onto their own virtualized and physical servers

Network architecture

  • Use lots of partitioning of data across NICS and Physical Switches (aka switch processors)
  • Use firewalls in front of each switch in the top three tiers (UI, Application, and Object Persistence Layers)
  • Place network probes between each firewall and load-balancer to monitor utilization and intrusion detection
  • Place each application stack, a complete web application, application server and database server, in at least two data centers in two different geographic locations using two different internet data service providers
  • Create a private point-to-point network between data centers for transaction load balancing using two different internet date service providers

I know was a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo. Frankly, I haven’t met that many web designers, web-developers, or even a lot of software developers that understand everything I’ve listed. In order to implement the list, it will take more than one skillset from several technology professionals. (Business owners can contact me privately about assessing the maturity of your development staff. You might be surprised.)

If you don’t understand it, I am happy to elaborate privately. Understand that this is what I do when I’m not playing drums in a Jazz combo.