IBM Redbook on Strategic Reuse with Asset-Based Development

A good friend of mine Lee Ackerman let me know last week that a IBM have just publicly released a draft of a new IBM Redbook, titled: Strategic Reuse with Asset-Based Development.

The Redbook is structured as follows:

Part 1. Introduction

• Chapter 1. Introduction to Asset-Based Development


• Chapter 2. ZYX Electronics case study


• Chapter 3. Tools in support of Asset-Based Development


• Chapter 4. Introduction to the IBM Rational Unified Process


• Chapter 5. Asset-Based Development and Asset Governance Rational Method Composer plug-ins


• Chapter 6. Value, impact and return on investment

Part 2. Reusable Assets

• Chapter 7. Adopting Asset-Based Development


• Chapter 8. Configure your asset repository


• Chapter 9. Produce reusable assets


• Chapter 10. Consume reusable assets


• Chapter 11. Manage reusable assets

Part 3. Service Assets in an SOA

• Chapter 12. Introduction to service assets


• Chapter 13. Producing service assets


• Chapter 14. Consuming service assets


• Chapter 15. Managing service assets

Part 4. Patterns

• Chapter 16. Introduction to patterns


• Chapter 17. Produce: model-to-text pattern implementations


• Chapter 18. Produce: model to model


• Chapter 19. Produce: packaging for deployment


• Chapter 20. Consuming pattern implementations


• Chapter 21. Managing pattern implementation assets

Part 5. Appendixes

• Appendix A. Rational Asset Manager: installation and administration


• Appendix B. Integrating Asset-Based Development into a process


• Appendix C. Additional material

The value and use of Rational Data Architect in SOA

The IBM Information management yesterday announced that the paper "The value and use of Rational Data Architect in SOA" was published today as part of the series "The Information perspective of SOA design"

Here is the abstract from that paper:

Discover how you can use the IBM® Rational® Data Architect, IBM Industry Models and the unified metadata management of IBM Information Server to align process, service, and data models. Use these tools to accelerate your SOA project. The fifth part of "The information perspective of SOA design" series describes the key features of the products that support the data modeling pattern in SOA.

Pattern (reusable) assets classification

Reusable software assets represent significant IP in terms of lessons learned from previous engagements and can to address both functional and non-functional requirement (e.g. a performance non-functional requirement could be addressed using the requester side caching pattern asset). However, because assets are not currently cataloged against meaningful criteria, such as functional and or non-functional requirement, they are often not leveraged or reused effectively by architects to help make more consistent architectural decisions.

The importance of Architecture in an SOA can not be overstated. Yet when it comes to making architectural decisions in our software labs or on engagements there is often no consistency, tractability or accountability in terms of the decisions made. These architectural decisions are driven by non-functional requirements (e.g. performance, transactionality, tractability, scalability, etc).

Assets such as software patterns assets are often represented by many assets such as a pattern specification and/or pattern implementations and these assets are often hard to locate because of this lack of consistent and meaningful cataloging. Also the knowledge and use of a asset, such as an industry model asset is often local to a particular practitioner or architect. This leads us to a situation both in software development labs and more importantly on field engagement where is no consistency way of consuming assets and leveraging lessons learned to achieving architectural consistency traceability and accountability.

Below is a meta model that shows how reusable assets can be used to create a solution and goes into more detail and classification around a particular type of reusable asset: the software pattern reusable asset.