The Martian principles for successful enterprise systems - Ronald Mak

When you need to land and operate a robot on Mars, "halfway" software is not an option. While helping to develop the Collaborative Information Portal, or CIP, for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, Ronald Mak identified and refined a set of principles that represent the fundamental goals necessary for any successful enterprise system. Following them, Mak's team developed a CIP that scientists, researchers, and engineers have been using continually for over two years to access data from two Martian rovers. Its uptime record?99.9%.

The principles are language and platform independent. They're not design patterns or code samples. They're not even rocket science. They just work.

Real–world examples from the Rover mission help you learn to:

• Take advantage of what others have learned from their mistakes
• Realize that clients may not know how to know what they want
• Acknowledge that you aren't clairvoyant
• Think like a user
• Test, anticipate, be flexible, and keep it simple
• Recognize that code integration is a greater challenge than code development
• Become the successful architect of a successful system