Art & Science of Being an IT Architect

A mix of crisp insight and totally random thoughts on software development, estimating, corporate politics, consulting skills, and more.

Last refreshed: August 18th, 2025 at 9:21 PM ⓘ

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Episodes

Still More on Reverse Engineering Code into UML Diagams

Judging by the unexpectedly large number of hits on my recent posting about reverse engineering Java into UML diagrams , I am not the only one interested in this topic. Along the same lines, I found this pretty cool demo of reverse engineering UML sequence diagrams from Sparx Systems . I haven't actually used the tool but what appears to be different with the reverse engineering capability of their Enterprise Architect tool is that it will generate diagrams via runtime execution. It also let you...

Dec 18, 2007•1 min

Reverse Engineering of UML Class and Sequence Diagrams from Java

About a year ago I had to stop work on an interesting project. There were just too many projects going on at one time, not enough resources to work on them all, and the other projects were more important from a political point of view. The project involved our B2B application making a call to a service provided by a 3rd party outside the firewall. One of the developers had built some great Java code to do this right before we stopped work. I recently picked that project back up again and needed ...

Dec 18, 2007•5 min

On War and Aggessive Project Schedules

I recently attended a 3-day "Business Design Assurance" or BDA held by my client. On the first day it was clear that there were still a lot of unresolved issues and the desired delivery date of the rollout to the first country was a risk. There was a lot of talk along the lines of "we can't go live without XXX!" A certain Senior Vice President could not attend the second day of the BDA but had the following as a message posted on the wall when everyone arrived for the second day of discussion. "...

Dec 18, 2007•59 sec

Perils of Over-Customizing SAP-Broken Reports

I've been around clients for some great discussion on the perils of over-customizing SAP lately. I hope to collect some of the lessons learned here for your reading enjoyment and career enrichment. Here's a comment made by a country sales manager at a meeting I attended in May 2007. "They told us that the new SAP system would have over 160 reports out-of-the-box that we could use to run our business and we didn't plan on having to create a lot of custom reports. Now they tell us that's not true....

Dec 18, 2007•2 min

The Global Lifestyle Time Challenge

I had a subtle career milestone today. Today I became fully aware that I was now "Global" ... with a capital "G" I think. At about 6:30 am Central time I checked email at home before leaving for the airport. I saw an email from a business leader in the UK which set off alarms in my head that an important business decision my client needed to make was not being addressed. Knowing that a politically important deadline is approaching, I fired off a "this is a big issue!" email designed to alarm my ...

Dec 18, 2007•4 min

Learn to Love Your SAP IDoc

Over a year ago, I had a post in which I discussed how difficult it is for a custom application development person like myself to get adjusted to projects based on a packaged application like SAP. It had the somewhat humorous title How to Talk to an SAP Consultant (If You Must). If you keep reading this post, you will see that I am now starting to understand some of the SAP terminology which once seemed so incomprehensible. I hope you will find this post helps accelerate your own understanding o...

Dec 18, 2007•6 min

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