Banking software are definitely not like Airbus planes?

Ecris le 18 juin 2005
Dans la catégorie Uncategorized |

Thanks to James Robertson, I came across this column, ranting against OOP. Nothing very interesting in the argumentation. For instance, taken in his ranting fever, the author states:

If Airbus or Boeing built aircraft like the IT industry builds software, aircraft would constantly be dropping out of the sky.

Take a look to this post if you want to know why Airbus are not dropping out of sky.Anyway, programming is a difficult task, and we should not blame anybody to not understand all the concepts. A good starting point for the author could be to try to follow Dave’s patterns to improve his OO skills.What picked my interest was this paragraph:

For example, there’s a little thing in the banking world called “reconciliation”. It means tracking down and fixing the host of small errors introduced by the users of the system - people, in other words.

I have three comments:

1) Reconciliation is the human task of fixing errors introduced by the computers.

2) Do not try to have zero reconciliation: this is like seeking for 0 defects. Try instead to cover the 80% easy cases automatically, and leave the other for human professional of the domain.

3) Discrepancies and reconciliation in a large bank cannot be avoided. They are generated by the collision of two opposing forces, evolving with different rythm:

Front offices trying to adapt quickly to customers needs and bringing innovation into products every day
Back office trying to lower cost by automating and group process into common systems design for large volume, low cost processing.

The interface and the management of those two different forces are the main challenges of a banking architect. And, of course, OO can help you manage the difference of evolution rythms beetween domains.But instead of seeking Visual Basic or Perl script, start by an efficient easy to learn language.