Services


Han van Roosmalen Softwarediensten (Software services) provides consultancy related to software architecture and development. The following keywords apply to what I am doing:

  1. Insight
  2. Governance
  3. Overview

In summary Han van Roosmalen Softwarediensten provides services to projects that for some reason proceed in a sub-optimal way.

Insight

In many situations it is unclear to a customer what the quality of an application is in terms of: structure, modifiability, maintainability and analysability. Strangely enough the creator of that application hardly can provide any answer to that question and in many cases struggles with the same problem.

The customer or user notices this for instance when desired changes or additions to the existing application are realised slowly or incompletely. The provider notices that changes to and bug removals take more and more time than expected. The application seems to approach the end of its life cycle and team members suggest that development must start over again. Sometimes driven by obsoleteness of technology but many times because of the lack of insight into the structure of the application.

In the majority of cases the architecture of the application is the bottleneck. It could be that an application was developed with a clear architecture combined with good ideas and intentions, but most of the time the application has just grown to what it is now. A mix of unclear couplings, structures and technological partial solutions.

In all cases the application is prone to what is called architecture erosion and becomes more complex than is really required.

Governance

During the development process of a software application, starting with the initial design, during which:

  • functional requirements are defined and
  • a technological solution (the software architecture) is chosen,

till the maintenance phase in which:

  • bugs are being solved and
  • new functionality is added,

it is of major importance that the software architecture is guarded. In other words, during the application life cycle the desired architecture and realised architecture should match as close as possible. Even in cases in which one or more software architects have designed and documented the desired architecture it happens that a single developer or development team make decisions that might not be conform the ideas and intentions of the software architects. When the software architects has unsufficient insight in what is going on architecture erosion starts as soon as the first line of code is written. Governance of the architecture under development is crucial. Without to-the-point governance it is difficult to ward off deviations that in the end are difficult to recover and costly.

Overview

Overview for all stakeholders can only then be achieved when insight and governance are well in place. When sufficient overview exists all stakeholders can come to useful conclusions and help to overcome problems. Better anticipation to the future is easier.

To achieve sufficient insight it is important that all stakeholders speak the same language which is seems pretty far away right now.

I invite you to read a couple of pages on this site to get an understanding how I provide valuable services.

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