Agile system design and build

It is commonly understood that in today´s global market, business requirements can change rapidly. During the mid 1990´s business process reengineering (BPR) has been eulogised as the solution to help organisations achieve the agility required to cope with this demand. As with many of the new business theories, practical application has born little relation to theory. What has become clear however, is that the opportunity to embrace the claimed benefits of reengineering has been encumbered by the inability to make changes to an organisation´s IT systems. The paper describes two pieces of work that help support the design and build of more agile IT systems that should enable businesses to adapt their processes and support IT systems in line with requirements. Both are based on the notion that it is important to raise the level of abstraction, when building IT systems, to a point where systems can be described in terms of domain semantics and not programming terminology. The first part describes an approach being tested in current work involving a financial institution in the City of London. The approach involves dealing with a large legacy IT application and providing a migration path through to a more agile form of system building. The second describes work recently completed where separation of component action, interaction and behaviour, and infrastructural support for each, provide a means of executing system designs and moving the system builder away from the programming paradigm