Non Functional requirements driving technology choice

With the slue of new technologies out of Microsoft over the past 2 years,
WCF, WWF, WPF, Silverlight, LINQ, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services, MVC Framework, ASP AJAX etc... It is becoming increasingly confusing for developers to figure out what technologies to use, and how and where to apply them.

The danger facing many new projects is to fall into the trap of using a technology because it is new, rather than a good fit to the requirements of the problem at hand.

I always start with the non functional requirements before making any decision about the implementation technology.

Application architecture results from the balancing of functional and the non-functional requirements applicable to the system. Non-functional requirements (restrictions and constraints) serve the purpose of limiting the number of potential solutions that will satisfy a set of functional requirements.

Functional requirements are the behaviour that the owner of the system would like to emerge from the development process. All architectures exhibit emergent behaviour. If the emergent behaviours are not specified / managed in the form of non-functional requirements, the developers will choose them on behalf of business, leading to misalignment.

Architecture is applied at two levels:
·The application architecture addresses the software components of the actual application.
·The systems architecture addresses the physical (hardware) and logical distribution of components across the network environment.

The non-functional aspects that I usually consider when formulating architecture

Simplicity - number one non functional

Security – this requirement in my opinion is not an option, the five pillars of Authentication, Authorisation, Integrity, Confidentiality, and Non-repudiation need to be catered for in any application you design.

Performance – here I am looking at things like number of online transactions, batch runs and if applicable the throughput from a users perspective. The last one is quite important as to a user of any system with a front end, this is all that matters, this requirement often allows you to factor the system to cater for the different expectations that will be imposed in the system by its users.

Maintainability - The ease with which code can be understood and changed, the aspect of maintainability should be pervasive throughout any architecture you design, any item must be created with the eye towards maintaining it.

Integrity - Ability to detect and manage invalid data coming in to system and the imposition of complete transactions or rollbacks.

Extensibility - Ease with which new features can be added to the code, not the same as maintainability, things like composite applications work really well here.

Flexibility - Ease with which the software can be deployed in different environments.

Scalability - Ability of the system to grow with the organisation without code changes, increase in number of users, increase in number of transactions.

As you would have noticed, many of these requirements are in direct opposition of each other; in conjunction to this there is a price to pay for achieving any of them fully.

As a software architect the responsibility is on you to attempt to balance these conflicting forces and find the best alignment to fit the system specifications.
It is also your task to align technology risks with the appetite for risk of the organisation.

By evaluating the system against these non functional requirements first I find that my options of implementation technology usually get reduced into a manageable set.

Mix Essentials 2008

I attended the Mix Essentials at Monte casino yesterday, a big thanks to the organizers for a great venue and for organizing Brad Abrams.

South African developers have been a bit deprived in getting to meet the legends of the business, I was fortunate to meet Juval Lowe last year at Dariel Solutions WCF Master Class, and with Brad coming out this year things are definitely looking up.

Silverlight was the focus of the event, and it looks great, and it has good tool support in the form of Blend. Would I use it? Maybe, as a developer the touchy feely artistic side of UI development has never really got me excited, but I understand that the UX is all that a user sees and it can make or break any application.

I think the success of this platform will depend on its uptake in the designer community who already has a large investment in Flash. I as a developer will not be moving my web apps to Silverlight soon, but I can see myself incorporating pieces of Silverlight into ASP AJAX sites where a bit of bling is needed.

Good news is that ASP.NET AJAX is here to stay; Silverlight for now is aimed at RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications). The contracts to build such applications usually go to advertising agencies and graphic designers, not hard core development houses.

Dev shops need to know about Silverlight, and its capabilities and can leverage it to add to the UX of their offerings, but I do not see it replacing ASP.NET AJAX for line of business applications just yet.

I followed the developer track, and really nothing earth shattering was on show, Brad demoed ASP AJAX which we have been using for years now, nice that it has been built into VS 2008, but you still need to get the toolkit for all the latest controls.

This is becoming a mature platform, there are lots of great controls, and optimizations available.
MVC framework is a great project to watch in the future I feel that it is still a bit immature as it is today, but it is a great idea. The routing engine is clever and having the ability to use URL mapping rules to handle both incoming and outgoing URL scenarios adds a lot of flexibility to application code.

It means that if we want to later change the URL structure of our application (for example: rename /Products to /Catalog), we could do so by modifying one set of mapping rules at the application level - and not require changing any code within our Controllers or View templates.

Brad hinted that versions of MVC for WPF and Win Forms are in the pipeline. Could he be alluding to the WPF Composite client project, a rebuild of CAB for WPF?

Dynamic Data was on show, this seems like the BLINQ project renamed, it currently only works with LINQ to SQL, but Entity framework will follow soon. It is fully customizable and could be a great time saver in certain projects.

Why Metal Lemon?

Metal Lemon is a play on the classic saying when life gives you lemons make lemonade, well lemonade is useful, but power is even more useful , a lemon, a nail and a piece of copper can be used to make a battery, if you have enough you have the potential to power anything, so take lifes lemons and turn them into something potentially great.