Building complex systems to power an entire global operation is NOT easy and NEVER to be taken lightly.  As an engineer, understand the process is paramount to building systems that work and that are NOT thrown out in two years to build something new.  Large corporations want to build stable systems that can be used for at least 10 years or more and not back them into a corner and become obsolete in 3-5 years.  

This includes the application, the database and everything in between. How is this done?  I take an extremely pragmatic approach to software systems development and engineering.  I focus my team on spending the bulk of the time in requirements definition and gathering upfront.  Many corporations LOVE to push us forward and abandon this stage but if abandoned, you run the risk of building the wrong system.  

I first begin all software development by defining all team members who this application will impact.  I mean everybody.  Users, upper management, developers in the United States, developers in India, ancillary systems that connect and interface/provide data to the new system, cross functional teams, etc.  When I say everybody, I mean EVERYBODY and every system that will touch and interface with the new system.  

I typically start by assigning and implementing an architecture review board for the project that is made up of key members of each of the teams aforementioned.  The idea is to get people involved in the new system development even if you think they have no business in it.  If we are migrating from a legacy platform that was mainframe based, I WANT those people on the team.  There is always someone at the corporation who always thinks that these people are meaningless.  I’m here to tell you that that is a serious problem in thinking.  

The people who supported and/or developed the legacy application know how the system and process works.  We need their process knowledge to build the new system.  They are very important.  

This blog will walk through several systems that I have built and the process of building that system.  We will start with a system that I architected and built for a major US Fortune 100 firm that develops train tracking system software.