WELCOME TO “Q.E.D.”

I am a software architect who focuses on problems and challenges attending the building, testing, and deployment of business applications in an enterprise setting.

Doing these things well is hard. It requires an understanding of how to assemble software building blocks into runtime applications that are testable, deployable, monitored, and updatable over time. It also requires knowledge of how enterprises behave, for this is the context within which applications are written, tested, deployed, monitored, and governed.

As it happens, these skills are not dissimilar from those required for modeling and testing problems in the social and physical sciences — areas of inquiry with which I have some passing familiarity through education and previous professional experience. The substantive domains and some of the technical tools may differ. But underlying principles of abstraction, encapsulation, and modularity span both engineering and scientific disciplines.

And sometimes, the technical tools overlap. Dynamic simulaiton modeling (e.g., system dynamics and discrete event simulation) is an example. Social and physical processes execute over time. So do software processes. Both, therefore, lend themselves to dynamic simulation modeling.

I grew up intellectually with a steady diet of comparative statics in graduate economics and political science (via game theory and cognate rational choice approaches). And so, I am embarrassed to admit that the importance of processes executing over time eluded me until I was forced to confront their import in problems related to the functional and performance testing of distributed software systems. I think I get it now (better late than never). Consequently, I have been paying increasing attention to the application of dynamic process modeling/simulation techniques to domain areas of interest to my current professional focus.

And thus, I will be using this blog to explore technical issues related to these and other related interests. An underlying theme that will tie these posts together, apart from what I have said already, is a hopefully relentless commitment to sustained logical argument supported by systematically assessed empirical evidence. In short, the kind of findings worthy of the epithet, Q.E.D.