investigating software

When it comes to rolling out updates to large complex banking systems, things can get messy quickly. Of course, the holy grail is to have each subsystem work well independently and to do some form of Pact or contract testing – reducing the complex and painful integration work. But nonetheless – at some point you are going to need to see if the dog and the pony can do their show together – and its generally better to do that in a way that doesn’t make millions of pounds of transactions fail – in a highly public manner, in production.  (This post is based on my recent lightning talk at  PyData London ) For the last few years, I’ve worked in the world of high value, real time and cross border payments, And one of the sticking points in bank [software] integration is message generation. A lot of time is spent dreaming up and creating those messages, then maintaining what you have just built. The world of payments runs on messages, these days they are often XML messages – and they can be pa

 As I write this, my dog is grumpily moving around the room pausing intermittently to give me disappointed looks - looks that only my elderly mother could compete with. She (my dog) is annoyed by the robot vacuum cleaner. Its not been run for a while in that room - and its making a noisy foray into dark corners in a valiant effort to cleanse the mess. Its grinding gears and the cloud of dust in its wake is not helping to ease the dogs nerves. The dog's pleading puppy dog eyes & emotions have of course been anthropomorphised - at least a bit - by me (My dog is 7 years old and weighs over 20kg - so has little to fear). That is - I've taken human feelings and mapped them onto my dog. I know she has emotions - but she lacks language - or at least a language that (1) we humans understand, (2) maps to the same phrases or concepts I'm using. But I'm human, That's how I think and how I interact with people and sometimes - machines. Deciphering the problem and representi