Welcome to the section of the Exia site devoted to discussion of software engineering principles.

Unlike many discussions of software engineering, which take a very broad apprach and often end up degenerating into largely theoretical discussions with little practical application, these discussions take a narrow approach and focus on immediately usable principles, concepts and implementations.

We focus on the Microsoft .NET business application domain. A typical software application in this domain is used by a government department or medium sized organization for managing a core business process for a group of a few dozen to a few hundred personnel. Its key architectural components are a database, business rules engine, web services and a web or smart client user interface. It costs a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars to develop.

Applications such as these are built by the hundreds every year. Building them should be a routine engineering task with predictable timeframes and outcomes. However, it is far from that. In spite of the distance that software engineering has come, building medium sized business software systems is still difficult challenge that seems to perpetually defy order. Schedules are routinely missed by fifty percent. Budgets are still missed by as much or more. Teams still build processes from scratch each time they meet, and still argue over what processes to use for such fundamental things as gathering requirements, conducting JAD sessions, and creating software designs.

Should it really be this hard?

At Exia, we don't think so. We think that if you focus on a specific class of applications you can systematize and codify the way those applications are created, reducing the risk and increasing the profitability and resulting software quality.

Rethinking and improving processes is what Exia is all about, and that's what you'll find in these pages; discussion of the process of software engineering for line-of-business applications written in .NET.