Saturday, May 31, 2008

On Maturity



After a week break -- lot of work, some taking care of family health issues - I am back catching up on the community Blogs. One thing that I saw has been a debate whether CEP is not mature enough. I think that both sides have a point, depending on what "maturity" means. I'll make a distinction between: maturity of an application, maturity of a product, and maturity of a technical area.


Maturity of an application is measured in the fact that an application is working with relatively low amount of faults, and satisfy its functional and non-functional goals. Typically there is some time for stabilizing the application followed by a maturity time, and in some point the application becomes an obsolete in something, which requires to initiate the next generation.

Maturity of a software product is materialized in the fact that the product is working, being used in applications, and has relative few bugs, and customers trust it to rely on it.

Maturity of a technical area has to do with the level of understanding of this area by customers, amount of utilization of the area relative to potential, clear concepts and standard support.

In the CEP area we certainly have mature applications, we also have some maturity in the products of the first generation, but we are somewhat far from the maturity of the entire area.