Common Business Application

A common business application is software developed to facilitate the operation of some industry. These applications are complex enough that we often require business experts to work in tandem with us to get the business successfully modeled in software. The common business application is not about Creating, Reading, Updating, and Deleting data from a database. Rather the common business application is about managing a business that figures things out, calculates answers, automates processes and as a result creates things, consumes things, changes things, and removes things.  This is an important point of view that separates a business application from a database-babysitting application which has a different "data-centric focus." This common business application is not a marketing website, or a one-off standalone utility to transfer files across a network. It is not an application that is written in a week. Maintainability and understandability are at a higher premium than the speed at which it can be completed and even operates.  This is not to say a schedule and performance are not important, but rather not as important as maintainability and understandability.

I feel the need to define the common business application because I can expect (based on past experience) that people will counter my points with examples taken from trivial applications that they are writing in their basement for their uncle’s pawn shop. Although this sounds like a funny example, I think there is a lot of equivalent work being done by professional software contractors pumping out code for clients as fast as they can that will be completely rewritten in 2 years.

Examples: Common Business Applications