Software Development on a Leash is designed as a roadmap for experienced developers and architects who are interested in implementing a turbocharged software development process that encourages reuse and innovation. Author David Birmingham's products have been successfully deployed in a variety of venues, including highly complex desktop environments, with rapid turnaround and high-intensity delivery deadlines. This book contrasts the application-centric development approach to the architecture-centric development approach, introducing the concept of the metamorphic superpattern-the capability of a software program to dynamically adapt to changing application requirements without rebuilding the binary executable. Birmingham invites the reader to deploy reusable structural and behavioral building blocks, along with some powerful frameworks to gain immediate traction in any setting. He includes a high-speed multidimensional toolkit to organize and deploy the building blocks, essentially weaving the application together at run-time rather than being hard-wired in program code. Birmingham then ties the building blocks together with structural and behavioral metadata, allowing simple, interpreted macros to drive everything from database access, screen layouts, and many aspects of software development normally embedded directly into the software programand reused! The rapid deployment effect this creates allows developers to perform simple surgical application changes or rapid, sweeping rework/enhancement-without changing compiled software.

David Birmingham is president and chief executive officer of Virtual Machine Intelligence and chief architect of vMach 4.0, a high-reuse Visual Basic framework. He has written numerous articles on design patterns and data warehousing for Pinnacle Publishing and Data Management Review, and he provides consulting services to large-scale enterprises on a regular basis.