An Architect's View

Brian Carroll, who leads the architecture group for the ALF Project wrote to me today. He had this to say about the project.

"I know this will sound like it trivialize ALF, but I view one of ALF's most tangible benefits is The end of "cut and paste" (at least among development tools). Instead of forcing some overworked developer perform his most dreary task - cutting and pasting (or worse, retyping) data that was entered already from one tool to another (from any of: Requirements tool, Project Schedule tool, Spreadsheet, Configuration Management tool, Issue Management tool, Testing tool to any other tool from the same list).

"From a software developer's perspective, ALF will be a blessing. I suspect there is not one red-blooded developer who would rather manually retype and cut-and-paste data between tools than who would prefer to write an ALF ServiceFlow to automate the same dreaded, dreary task.

"Modern tools have certainly improved over the years, but I hate to think of the hours I have wasted retyping "Why I changed this module" into both bug tracking and configuration management systems, or cutting and pasting a list of tasks into a project scheduling tool, or taking a list of data elements in a class and a defining a corresponding table to persist or XML to expose that class. Individual tools are be more helpful today - until you need to move data from one tool to another. And for that, ALF can help.

"ALF does for cross-tool integration what macros did for single-function tools.

I can see that Brian is already waiting for the day when all of the infrastructure tools he uses are ALF enabled.

Kevin