When my organization decided to hire a new CTO, one of his top priorities was to look through our old support contracts and “cut the fat,” as it were. It was there, among the rubble, where we found a transformational tool that we had cast aside which could help us increase our development productivity and software quality. But in learning more about this tool we found that it hadn’t failed us, but rather, we failed it! So my brand-new boss gave me a brand-new ultimatum: Integrate this tool into our software development lifecycle, or we’re dumping it. The tool was CAST’s Application Intelligence Platform (AIP), used to increase an application’s … Read More
Tag Archives: Software Development
How to Build the Best Action Plan for your Application
Applications are built on thousands, millions, maybe even tens of millions, lines of code. They are based on specific architecture gathering technologies, frameworks, and databases set up with their own specific architecture. If you have an action plan to improve your application on a specific issue, what will be your strategy? Do you select one problem related to quality or take the opportunity to refactor part of your application? You know about issues coming from end users, but how do you address those inside the structure of your application? I remember meeting with development teams and management who were trying to find the root cause of performance issues, as delays … Read More
Empowering Developers with System-Level SAM Tools
The analogy between brick-and-mortar building architecture and software architecture is used quite often. Although they are quite different, this still helps to remind us that in software engineering everything is interdependent with a crucial cause-effect factor, which is actually thousands of times more sensitive than in hardware construction. It is fairly obvious that the quality of a building is a combination of the quality of the bricks, the quality of the assembly of the bricks in the wall, and the quality of the assembly of the walls (along with the electricity, plumbing, etc.). So it follows that assessing the quality of an application does require more than assessing the quality … Read More
Cracking Open the Black Box of IT for CEOs
I spend some of my time with CEOs or CFOs, and time and again they tell me that IT is a black box that’s difficult, if not impossible, to measure. They can’t measure productivity. They can’t measure output. They can’t measure outcomes. They can’t measure risk. But, the thing they can measure is the IT cost. Just this week the CEO of a well-known financial services company told me: “I have 2,000 people working in IT with a budget of $200 million a year, and yet I have no idea how the development teams are doing in relation to the competition, or if I’m even getting my money’s worth. And … Read More
3 Simple Tips to Maintaining a Rock-Solid Software Architecture
I have some good news and I have some bad news. First, the good news: Most smart development teams invest a lot of time designing a rock-solid architecture before the first line of code is even written for a new application. Now, the bad news: Once the architecture is designed, the conversation about it often ends. It’s built and then forgotten while the team runs off and builds the app, or when the application is transferred to a new development team. Thoughtfully designed architectures with solid design principles might begin to degrade almost the instant they are implemented. How can a team maintain a proper architecture, iteration after iteration? There’s … Read More
Agile has replaced waterfall, but have quality outcomes changed?
The software industry is moving very quickly from the traditional waterfall model to the agile methodology. We’re certainly producing software more quickly, but is the software we’re producing any better? Before we get into that though, let’s look at the reasons for this shift in mindset from waterfall to agile. Firstly, there are a few concerns with the waterfall approach which are re-emphasized time and again. They include: The inability to adopt changes during the development phase because of initial scope freeze. (If the design phase has gone wrong, things can get very complicated in the implementation phase.) Key decisions are taken with little knowledge of project and product. Resource … Read More
Fast or Nimble? Agile Should be Both
I was watching the gymnastics competition at the Olympics on Sunday night and on more than one occasion heard commentators applaud competitors for their agility. As I watched these gymnasts move swiftly and with exacting precision across the beam, floor, vault and bars, I could not help but marvel at their abilities and at how appropriate a descriptor “agile” was for them. Long before businesses tossed around the term “Agile” as a method of technology project management, it stood as a word that often affixed to people and objects that displayed a certain set of characteristics. People earning the moniker “agile” almost invariably were both fast and nimble – not … Read More