of various architectural design patterns helps to evolve a
reliable,performant and scalable solution. Applying same design pattern
or getting into a fixed/rigid way of solving all problems is a major
issue and cripple the functioning of software. eg: Presentation,
compute,data oriented problems are all unique and one cannot apply a
same pattern to all these problems.
Also One need to understand is no matter how hard you analyze and design
in development or testing there would be some disruputive innovation
coming along which may force you to rethink your design if not in near
future, These disruptive innovations are inevitable and one cannot
accomodate for them in design but you can anticipate minor changes and
provide "knobs" in design to turn on/off certain minor but yet can
change performance/scalability to some extent.
It is not surprising atleast for me having spent last 10+years in
software testing on large systems to see that most of the java apps
still suffer from Concurrency and GC issues.
Lot of research is going into Concurrency area with functional
constructs similar to erlang,clojure,scala etctype coming into java 7
and more into atomic locking constructs,scaling across cores.
This is still a growing area with Software/Hardware Transactional Memory
, Message passing,shared state with more controls etc all the techniques
explored in terms of code clarity, time/space trade offs etc . Even
hardware/software co-design like that of Oracle's Exalogic,Azul compute
appliances etc)
Another area is embracing with some sort of predictive/limited or
avoiding as much as GC as possible.
I had been involved in Software testing from stability,performance,
scalability aspects right from 2000 starting with mainframes(COBOL,
CICS) to latest apps running on JVM using various design patterns.
Manytimes i tell people on things to watch out for or my opinions which
they do initially neglect and later on come back to me to say "Oh yes
you said that sometime back...i didnt get it..."
