Enterprisey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Enterprisey is a derogatory term describing sophisticated software architecture which is claimed to be good enough (robust, flexible, etc.) for use in enterprise applications, but in fact is merely excessively complex and baroque.
Enterprisey complexity is usually caused by irrational conformity to fads and pseudo-traditions and to marketing influences, by organizational pressure to provide complex general solution with high budgets, by inexperienced software designers confusing complexity and quality; it is therefore the opposite of justified software complexity actually required by intrinsically difficult problems.
Enterprisey complexity should also be distinguished from bad software designs which are complex because they try to address difficult problems in good faith but unsuccessfully, like most of CORBA and early Enterprise Java Beans, and from bad designs that irrespective of the complexity have fatal flaws.
The term enterprisey applies to specific overdesigned application software, to badly selected frameworks and libraries that add a lot of complexity but little value, and to software development tools and "technologies" that promote meaningless complications.
An example use would be "That SOAP-based ESB is so enterprisey!".
The phrase was coined by Alex Papadimoulis in a The Daily WTF article "Enterprise SQL" when sarcastically praising some overly wordy and incompetent C# code for declaring useless constants.
