Do You Want Out of Your Arranged I/T Marriage?

I had gotten pretty far behind in my reading and decided to take some time to thumb through some of the trade magazines I’ve been avoiding for too long. Inside the November 2005 issue of Java Development Journal, I stumbled across something which got my I/T Architect antenna twitching.

You see, there is a side of us architects that thinks that if only our clients or organizations would devote some more resources to creating Enterprise-wide shared components, shared infrastructure, shared services, etc. life in the land of software development would be sweet. Great project success would happen in parallel as multiple teams reaped the benefits of all the smart decisions previously made.

Well Yakov Fain was able to burst my bubble and return me to reality in his article “Arranged Java Marriages” where he compares the uneasy relationship between the masses of Java developers and the architects who are tasked with centralized creation of reusable components or services or any other kind of software asset. As this arranged marriage progresses from honeymoon to adding children to fighting over the family budget, all is not always well. These arranged marriages usually take place in a culture where divorce is not an option, too.... or at least frowned upon. So the trick is, how do we architects live peaceful, productive lives with our programmer “spouses”?