Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Tools

Green Threads


Johnathan is a Usability Specialist at IBM's Toronto software lab. He can be reached at [email protected].


When my wife and I bought our first house, the home inspector reported a "slight suspicion" that the house might have been used in the past as a marijuana growing house. It hadn't. But the result of that comment was that I spent several weeks managing a complex flow of documents between lawyers, banks, insurance companies, police, and realtors—all of whom were ostensibly working for me, but none of whom were willing or able to talk to each other. Even within the same office, different people didn't seem to know what others were doing. If someone had come to my door offering an integrated end-to-end solution to home buying, he could have named his price.

Many businesses face this situation every day. They clearly know what their goals are, but much of their time is spent managing the friction between vendors and tools that are supposed to help them solve problems. Software development is no exception. As an industry, we are skilled at innovating new products to address new problems; however, customers almost never use a product in isolation, despite what some product teams may believe. The reality is that across their businesses, customers use a variety of products in a variety of roles. Work is handed off from one business unit to another, from one specialty to another, and in the absence of anything better, their integration tool of choice is copy-and-paste. Part of the solution to this problem lies in support for open standards, though that push really has more to do with how competing vendors of the same technology agree to interoperate. However, while necessary, standards are not sufficient. Even when there's an agreed-to set of standards—indeed, even when products originate from the same vendor—customer attempts to get a set of products from across their business to work together often fall short.

In this article, I describe IBM's "green threads" project, an ongoing internal effort to drive better interaction and integration across products and brands so that customers can focus on their goals, not their software. Our aim is to foster discussion in the development-process community and assist others in evaluating and implementing what we feel is an essential quality process for any software organization.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.