Vision
The AAF will be an integrated, standards-based collection of business entity definitions and relationships, data structures, and data, executable business process models, and business rule (or “decision”) models that together provide basic out-of-the-box business functionality that can be utilized as is, modified, extended, etc.
The foundation recognizes and implements common business entity and relationship, process, and decision patterns, leading to efficiency, re-use, and happy stakeholders and end-users. Business entities and their relationships represent the persons, places, and things that our information systems are intended to manage (i.e. the “nouns“). Business processes (i.e. the “verbs“) orchestrate the interactions and operations involving these entities. And business decisions (i.e. the “rules“) inform and constrain these processes.
History
The Adaptív Application Foundation (AAF) is the result of a number of related, reinforcing, and enabling ideas for software application technical design and implementation I’ve had and worked to realize and refine starting in 2003. These ideas have come to illustrate and embody my Metis approach to system design and architecture (my definition here).
In 2006 I founded Deceptively Simple Technologies Inc to take up the further development and promotion of technology product ideas like the AAF. Cygnus Techology Services is my services company, which focuses on consulting, customization, and commercialization of these ideas and products, guided by my own 25+ years of experience with technology leadership & strategy, people, product & process, and technology & tactics.
The AAF has gone through many successful incarnations over the years, enabling several organizations to quickly and efficiently create and maintain business technology solutions after investing the resources needed to implement the infrastructure that makes up the foundation. I’ve learned and refined my ideas in each case, and in a few places I’ve been fortunate enough to collaborate with other professionals who truly believed in the potential of this approach and helped to improve it and to push it forward.
But most of the time I’ve encountered ineptitude and laziness and fear and resistance bordering on hostility, misunderstanding of the process and timeline, inability to stay the course
I myself was also fearful of making these ideas public (hey, I’m old).
Today, I believe that I have clarified and resolved most of the inconsistent ideas in the AAF, and it is light, fast, adaptable, scalable, and ready to rock. In making it available under open source licensing, I intend to remove the “costs too much/takes too long” objections to custom implementations of the foundation as well as to “bake in” my process and attention to detail, which most developers don’t take the time to understand or value.