Sunday, February 22, 2009

On Event Processing and Software Life-Cycle Processes

I'll start with a reminder that the deadline for submitting papers for DEBS 2009. The DEBS conference is the major conference for event processing related research. I would like to highlight especially the industrial track and solicit submission both from vendors and customers. Vendors may not submit a marketing oriented paper, however can send papers about architectures, technical questions, language issues, semantic issues, and engineering related topics. We especially solicit experience reports of event processing systems of any kind that are working in production, with experience insights that may be of general interest. Note that a short abstract is due next Monday, February 23rd, the deadline for submission is currently March 2nd, however extension of a few days will probably be possible.



Many years ago I have taken a course that has qualified me to be "IT project manager", and when talking about software life-cycles the instructor showed us the picture above, since then I have a Pavlovian Conditioning that the term life-cycle is associated with this picture.

As a follow up to my recent posting about static and dynamic event flows, one of the related questions is whether event processing systems have the same life-cycle as other software artifacts, i.e. has to go through development and testing processes before going into production, or since it is very easy to modify such applications, this is not really needed, and changes can be done fast.

As usual in event processing there is no single answer. In some cases the event processing software is part of mission critical applications and thus any change should go through some validation and approval processes, which, alas, takes time and hurts the agility; in the other extreme there are systems in which an individual consumer defines personal alerts from events related to social networks, this application is not part of any enterprise application, and the consumer can add/modify/delete alerts every 10 minutes without upsetting anything except for himself, so there is no meaning to life-cycles and red-tapes.

Some applications may be hybrid. Part of it is a controlled logic, and part of it can be free for use to users.

1 comment:

Dazy said...

Though this is not suited for the direct application in a solid project, it offers a frame that national standards or corresponding process details to be figured in order to achieve a standard that can be used in an actual case.