La Antiblioteca

En “The Black Swan“, Nassim Nicholas Taleb describe el concepto de la Antibiblioteca:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encylopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head.
Let us call this an antischolar – someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device – a skeptical empiricist.

Desinformación y Verdades a Medias de Metodologías Ágiles

Timothy Fitz escribe en su blog una nota acerca de la definición real de una metodología ágil.

Inicia diciendo que está cansado de la desinformación:

• Agile means writing software without writing documentation.
• Agile means not caring about the long term.
• Agile means engineers get to decide the project’s features.
• Agile means not having strict practices.

También de las verdades a medias derivadas de ciertas prácticas:

• Agile means pairing.
• Agile means Test Driven Development.
• Agile means scrum.

Implementación de Procesos de Negocio con Reglas

Hay dos maneras de modelar un proceso de negocio: con un paradigma imperativo o declarativo. El primero utiliza un grafo que representa el orden o flujo de las tareas a realizar. El segundo es utilizando un conjunto de reglas que describen la relación entre las tareas.

El reto para los desarrolladores es entender el proceso y hacer la implementación de una solución con el paradigma adecuado. Si un procesos de negocio que no tiene una secuencia definida se implementa con BPM o BPEL, puede acabar con un grafo con cientos o miles de nodos y bifurcaciones (para un ejemplo ver figura de abajo), lo que lo haría difícil de mantener.

Por otro lado, no es recomendable modelar con reglas un flujo con una secuencia fija de acciones.

BPEL vs BPMN

Ambos conceptos son usados de forma indistinta por muchos consultores o vendedores. BPEL es un lenguaje para orquestación de servicios. BPMN es un lenguaje para el modelado de procesos de negocio en forma de flujos de trabajo.
De tal manera que una conversión de BPMN a BPEL no hace mucho sentido (aunque sea posible) y tampoco el usar BPEL para modelado de procesos de negocio.

En los siguientes enlaces se encuentra mayor información:
Process Component Models: The Next Generation In Workflow?
BPMN to BPEL: Lipstick On A Pig?
My Concluding Nuance On BPMN