What is Bottom Down Design?
Last week I attended a vendor conference at which representatives from the industry analysis firms spoke. One session that I sat in was just so egregiously bad that I have to comment on it. The speaker was from the firm that kind of sounds like ‘someone who tends to plants’.
Before he got too far into his scree, he polls the audience with the question of how many services they manage are part of their SOA activities. 10? 20? 50? 100? His blustery response was of this flavor: ‘No, dear audience you are WRONG, WRONG, WRONG because if you have Oracle or SQL Server or Windows XP you have tens of thousands of services — and if you didn’t know about these services, how could you possibly know about anything, you bunch of morons?! I am the ‘expert’, listen to me!’ At that point there was the needle scratching across the record sound effect going off in my head. Is this guy so clueless as to confuse real business services with APIs and interfaces? Yes, in fact, he was and that was just the start of the idiocy. He further goes on to say that you are not doing ‘real governance’ unless you are managing thousands of services — a statement unsupported by anything and one that flies directly in the face of the likelihood of a company having thousands of true business services. Unless you are trying to do governance retroactively, it can start with a single service and progress from there.
His formidable supply of malapropos did not add to his credibility. When speaking to a hype life-cycle chart, he continuously referred to the ‘thought of disillusionment’ rather than the ‘trough’ as well as repeatedly referring to one of the vendor products as ‘InFARvio’ rather than ‘Infravio’. My personal favorite was when he kept talking about doing ‘bottom down design’. No really — he used this expression like six times. This leads me to believe that he really doesn’t understand either top-down or bottom-up approaches, they are just words to him, words for him to torture at will apparently.
It is no wonder that there is confusion in the industry around SOA when vapid windbags like this are presented as experts and make outrageous claims that, with a little thought and examination, do nothing other than prove that they know not of what they speak.
Technorati Tags:
soa, analyst, bottomdown, suckage
