Brownfield (software development)

These traditionally assume a "clean sheet of paper", tabula rasa or "greenfield land" target environment throughout the design and implementation phases of software development.

Brownfield extends such traditions by insisting that the context (local landscape) of the system being created be factored into any development exercise.

Early, poorly informed abstractions are usually wrong and are often detected late in construction, resulting in delays, expensive rework and even failed developments.

A Brownfield-oriented approach embraces existing complexity, and is used to reliably accelerate the overall solution engineering process, including enabling phased, incremental change wherever possible.

This “meet in the middle” technique is familiar from other development methods, but the extensive use of formal abstraction and the use of patterns for both discovery and generation is novel.

In a VITA architecture, the problem definition of the target space can be maintained as separate (though related) native "headfulls" of knowledge known as Views.

The Analysis and Renovation Catalyst tool from IBM has taken this capability even further via the use of formal grammars and Abstract Syntax Trees to enable almost any program to be parsed and tokenized into a View for inclusion into the Inventory.

Brownfield solves this problem by abstracting concepts via an artisan’s best guess, using known patterns in its Inventories to extract and infer higher level relationships.

Formal abstractions enable the complexity of the Inventory to be translated into simpler, but inherently accurate, representations for easier consumption by those that need to understand the problem space.