Methodology

“Bad methodology impacts style. A poor style can be indicative of poor methodology.”

Methodology is a less-obvious component of Best Practice than style. It manifests itself in two key ways:

• Maintenance
• Performance

In both cases the first step in implementing a good project is to learn what methodology is poor, and how to avoid it.

Maintenance

Maintenance is the ability to update the workspace, and scale it up to a larger solution.

Maintenance relates to the concept of design patterns. A design pattern is the optimum layout of transformers to carry out a given task. A poor design pattern leads to complications when maintaining or scaling a workspace.

Poor design can often be detected in the style of a workspace; so if a workspace uses bookmarks and annotation correctly, but still doesn't look good, it may indicate flaws in the pattern of transformers.

Performance

Performance is the efficiency of the workspace in carrying out the translation using the fewest resources.

Performance is important to most users, but difficult to quantify. If a workspace runs to completion in an adequate time then performance is often ignored. Any flaws in performance then manifest themselves when an attempt is made to increase the scale of the project to handle more data.

Poor performance surprisingly also manifests itself in the style of a project, as well as in the design patterns used.