Vital few, trivial many: April 2017

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Advantages

Productivity is high and immediate for simple applications.
Less capable developers can work this way with little training.
Even deficiencies in requirements analysis can be overcome by releasing a prototype to users and then quickly changing the product to fit their requests.
Applications are decoupled from each other, so that delivery schedules of small modules can be planned relatively accurately. Expanding the system with additional, simple behavior can be easy.
Relational databases work well and provide integration at the data level.
4GL tools work well.
When applications are handed off, maintenance programmers will be able to quickly redo portions they can't figure out, because the effects of the changes should be localized to each particular UI.

Disadvantages

Integration of applications is difficult except through the database.
There is no reuse of behavior and no abstraction of the business problem. Business rules have to be duplicated in each operation to which they apply.
Rapid prototyping and iteration reach a natural limit because the lack of abstraction limits re- factoring options.
Complexity buries you quickly, so the growth path is strictly toward additional simple applica- tions. There is no graceful path to richer behavior.