In case you missed it, Friday was SysAdmin Day. What do you mean you've never heard of SysAdmin Day and don't know who your sysadmin is? Sysadmins are the talented souls inside every organization that silently, invisibly and diligently keep the networks, servers and PCs blinking, humming and processing. Some say sysadmins are like a good surgeon. They're not: a good sysadmin is more important than any surgeon. So Sysadmins get an official day of recognition.
What about application developers? They, after all, are the wheels that keep mighty application development and maintenance rolling. Just like Sysadmins, developers also go pretty unrecognized inside most organizations - unless, of course, the organization in question is like Microsoft and revolves around software. Often, the only time you know application developers even exist, is when the new software is late or has bugs. Boy, you sure know the developers' names then.
Of course, it takes more than a special day each year to recognize your teams' progress and achievements to the extent that it makes a tangible difference. What it really takes is great software and really good metrics, the kind that can record progress, identify weaknesses, and assess the impact of changes in management tactics and the provision of resources. Software and metrics help you to not only reward team members and recognize their achievements on a daily basis, but to do so in a way that directly benefits your organization.
Developers who get the material resources they require, the right training, or who simply get to keep management out of their hair are more likely to build the software that management asked for, and deliver it on time and on budget. Everyone likes to feel appreciated. Sometimes, you just don't need a special day each year to do it.
Microsoft recently announced Glidepath, a program encouraging ISVs to build "software factories" - re-usable software components to automate development. It's hoped these will cut the costs of building software and speed-up delivery. 6th Sense Analytics co-founder and CEO Greg Burnell, whose industry experience includes running TogetherSoft (bought by Borland), here assesses Microsoft's attempt to solve what is an industry problem while explaining the 6th Sense solution.
Q: Microsoft sounds like it's on to something with software factories. What's your take?
A: Microsoft's intentions are good, but the entire concept of software factories is flawed. Software factories fail to tackle the software industry's biggest problem.
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What's the number one challenge applications developers will face over the next five years? According to analysts at Gartner, it's the same one the businesses acquiring those applications will face: integration.
"In the past, developers didn't have to make [applications] work together because we had people doing the integration," Roy Schulte, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research, said during a session at the most recent Gartner ITxpo. "Now we've got applications talking to applications all over the place. And so it's something everybody has to do all the time."
"I cannot understand why this is not talked about more than it is," Schulte added.
He might not be hearing it, but developers are certainly talking about this app integration "challenge." Or at least they're thinking about it. Need evidence? How about Gartner's own stats, which show that 75 percent of all new applications being developed today use some kind of integration technology. Schulte pointed out that we can expect to see "integration logic" becoming another facet of the best-practices definition of applications, alongside presentation logic, business logic, and data logic. That's a huge change in application design. Need more evidence that developers and IT execs are thinking about application integration? Schulte's session was packed.
What developer working in the mainstream today could not know that the app he/she is building is going to be touched by other software? Even the schools are finally abandoning the old-style monolithic development styles, training their students instead for the fast-approaching service-oriented and event-driven world.
But Gartner does point out one worrying fact that may not be getting enough attention from the developer community: When you change the architecture of applications, you also have to change the middleware infrastructure running under those applications. "You can't do SOA using the kind of middleware you used for the past 20 years to build distributed applications," Schulte said. "Object request brokers, TP monitors, application servers, RPCs, sockets—-they're all great but they're not good for SOA and event-driven architecture. Therefore, you will have to change your underlying software infrastructure to use enterprise service buses."
The good news--or at least interesting news--is that stand-alone ESB products probably aren't long for this world. According to Schulte, it won't be long before most enterprises gain ESB functionality through other products that include them. The upcoming Windows Vista operating system, for example, includes the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) architecture. "You'll buy an integration suite from Tibco, WebMethods, IBM, or Oracle with an ESB in it," Schulte said. "You'll be using an ESB because it really is the right infrastructure for SOA and event-driven architectures, but you may not be choosing it."
Sometimes it’s not what you say or even the way that you say it. It�s what you imply or intimate that’s important.
Welcome to the world of “tacit interactions.” That is, interactions between people and between people and systems that really express what the person feels rather than what the person says they feel. Tacit interactions are important in businesses. They have implications in sales and marketing, shaping product strategy and pricing. Tacit interactions are also important in software development.
Captured and analyzed, tacit interactions can lead to real-world best practices that help software teams steer application development projects towards success. How? Because you are capturing information about the way people on your team are working. From there, you can refine and streamline development methodologies for re-use in other software development projects, helping drive those towards success. Software development is comprised solely of tacit interactions.
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