Who Is Your Mother-In-Law?

If you were to describe the dependencies of your application, would they look like a family tree? Do you know all the services on which you depend and if so, to what depth?

Have you ever had your application fail because a service it uses is unavailable? Sure, but what about if that service uses a service that goes down? We've always done a poor job of tracking who owns which app, not to mention which apps depend on which other apps or services.

If we used make tools like nmake or ANT, we could describe each component as a target and include each targets dependencies and then let the tool tell use the extended family tree.

As a bonus the support of this distributed environment becomes much easier. If we update a given component, we can let the tool figure out which apps need to be notified of the outage/upgrade/etc.


Your better half (the UI) has it's mother-in-law come for a visit ( a legacy app wrapped as a service). Does that make indirect services into cousins?