The Golden Spike Pattern J Wynia wrote an interesting post It's Time to Decouple Your Development Process where he talks about one of the most useful patterns a group of developers can use, it's a pattern I know as the Golden Spike Pattern. The name comes from the 1869 ceremony that drove the final spike completing the transcontinental railroad in the US. The railroad linked the eastern US with the western US, finally meeting up at Promontory in Utah. Constructing a transcontinental railroad is a complex time consuming business. They made it work by researching a general route for the railroad, acquiring the necessary property, and then having two sides building their parts of the railroad independently, The metaphor behind the pattern name isn't subtle. The idea is groups don't have to be in lock step dependency to create a complex system. All they need is a general plan and an agreement of where to meet up. In software a meet can be an API, schema, library, protocol, or a test suite. Once that meet up point is established all the different sides can go about there business without interdependencies. From a lean manufacturing point-of-view this is a powerful way of increasing overall system flow because it's dependencies that cause wasted time. Each side can work out their own issues in their own way, as long as they meet up. And how would you like spend a decade building a railroad and not have it meet up at the right place!
11:31:14 AM 
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