Application Management in the 21st Century: The route to ChangeBASE

I was asked a little while ago how we came up with the name ChangeBASE and I had to laugh a little. Even though I think the name seems to "work" the journey to create it was a little circuitous and tells maybe a little a too much about my friends and I.

A few years ago, my mates and I were playing around with BASE numbers such as BASE10 and BASE2 (decimal and binary). For those of you who have been watching and using ChangeBASE over the past few years, you will note that a number of the application compatibility rules and most of the application conflict rules are based on a 16x16 Binary Matrix. So thinking in BASE2 was not necessarily alien to us though it did impede polite conversation in our local drinking establishment.

As one of those nights progressed and (more beer, more binary, less polite conversation) and through a fit of pique and caprice we decided to merge two conversations (or "Loud Thinking") about change to Systems (note: the capital S here) and how they should be presented.

"Delta's!", Someone shouted. It's all about Delta's, if there is no change, then I am not interested.

"Fine!", we all agreed.

And then question was presented, "How do you represent change to a system?"

Physics comes in handy here, where change is represented with the Greek symbol Delta (see - it all makes sense now). Some commonly used “Delta’s” relate to movement such as;

Velocity
Acceleration
Jerk
Snap (or more formally, but less commonly Jounce)

Each of these types of changes are represented by differential equations such as;

I wanted to combine these ideas of change to a "BASE" system. So, we tried VeloBASE, AcceloBASE and for some reason JerkBASE attracted a lot of attention AND opprobrium (remember my comments on polite conversation) and so we came to Jounce.

I loved Jounce - it's sounds great. Jounce would have been really cool. Unfortunately, everybody thought we were a cool media company or trying to compete with YouTube and so we decided to keep things simple.

"Chaps, it's all about change. We should try to create a platform that will allow our customers to capture information and predict and report the outcomes of future changes. It's a database of changes, or a ChangeBASE."

Ahhh....

So, that's one version of the story. Here is another