Thus came the question: do software developers make more difference than accountants for their CEOs? Are they just something you need to have, but don’t really contribute to the performance of the organization? Off course, some of you could work for the Faceboogle-type of companies where software IS the product (or a big part of it). Some of you may also work in Enron-type of companies where accountants make a big difference ;o) In many other companies, software is an important support and enhancer of the activity: managing supply chains, customer relationships or monitoring mechanical products like car engines. However, the software development function is separated from the other operational activities. Developers are considered as a support function as accounting could be. This comparison is not so awkward, as accountants belong also mostly to the introverted psychological category, like developers. And accountants could also deliver information that could change the way a company works, finding for instance which products or customers are truly profitable.

In a book from Watts Humphrey, he quotes Dick Garwin, the designer of the hydrogen bomb, saying: “You can get credit for something or get it done, but not both.” Software developers may belong more to the second part of this alternative. Despite all problems that impact our projects, we deliver solutions that allows organizations do perform better, but we don’t get all the recognition that we deserve. Some might be happy with our current lack of visibility, but then we should not complain if we are often considered only as a cost variable that should be minimized and not elements that could increase revenues. To achieve this objective, it is important that developers get closer to their users and improve their knowledge of business. Users don’t want a cool Ruby on Rails Ajax apps, they want solutions for their problems. If we want more consideration from the high management, we might have to express more our positive impact in organizations. After all, even some accountants managed to do this.

Agile has become “the thing to do” in software development and is now being used as the (marketing) label of every new initiative or tool. As a result, the fate of the original values of Agile Manifesto are to be diluted at best, abused at worst. I believe that the Agile Manifesto signatories were motivated by a sincere goal to give to the people involved in software development projects a better situation at a time when there could be a tendency to consider them as mere procedure performers. However, as the agile ideas spread and became successful, they meet the fact that software development is also a business for software tools vendors, consulting organizations… and media like Methods & Tools. Going from selling toaster to selling agile toaster could be now a mandatory move to be listed in the LeadingAnalystFirm Bermuda Triangle report and the front page of the press. It will however not bring any real benefits to agile or to toasters. A recent trade magazine report and tool vendor press release spoke about “taming the agile beast”. This looks like a strange appreciation of Agile. Are thinking software developers dangerous animals? Does this mean that it is times to dump Mike Cohn and instead hire Siegfried and Roy to lead your projects? As Agile spreads, so are the chances that its initial ideas will be misunderstood… and that the number of failed projects claiming to follow the Agile approach will (strongly?) increase. I add the “claim” part, because some Agilists will reply that “true” Agile project cannot fail, but this would be the topic for another discussion.

Sir Winston Churchill said “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” The fact that it could be difficult to keep the ideal of approaches that rely strongly on participants’ behavior when you scale them should not prevent us to aim for the best objectives. We have however to be realistic on the real world constraints, adapt to them and recognize that we cannot always reach perfection ;o) On this topic, I recommend the excellent books of Craig Larman and Bas Vodde on scaling lean and agile development. In the introduction of their first volume, they wrote: “Start with a small group of great people and only grow when it really starts to hurt”. I could not give you a better advice. In our software development world, the “too big to fail” motto could easily be replaced by “too big to succeed”.

I was traveling back 20 year back in time when IBM already tried to combine multiple tools data in a single repository, an initiative called AD Cycle. The grails (without groovy) of having different vendors tools communicating has been since then attempted again by some other “standards” like CDIF (Common Data Interchange Format) or PCTE (Portacle Common Tool Environment). I am sure that you have all heard about these initiatives and that they are one of the key factors when you make a tool acquisition decision. Aren’t they?

One of the problems of these initiatives for uniting tools is that vendors mostly favor bilateral alliances and create integration with selected partners. However, the most important issue is that except for IBM, most of the industry players have a (very) short life expectancy. Most of them will disappear before the time needed to define and implement such standards. Anybody remember of Knowledgeware’s ADW, Index Technologies’ Excelerator or Arthur Andersen Method/1? If yes, it means that you have some gray hairs … and a good memory (let’s see the positive points). The current list of tool partners of OSLC is far from being impressive and the probabilities that this initiative will have the same fate than its predecessors are high.

Bye, Bye Borland

After the sale of its development tools division to Embarcadero in 2008, Borland kept only the tools dealing with requirements management and software testing. This didn’t improve its financial situation and finally Borland sold itself to MicroFocus. This was a sad end for a brand that accompanied software developer for more than 25 years. Software requirements have always been a secondary topic in the software development tools world and the trend towards agility hasn’t improved this. Now you can manage user stories with paper cards and a board. Approaches like UML are declining and you will find few items dealing with them in today’s programmers waterhole like dzone.com or stackoverflow.com, The end of Borland is just the symptom that this world is difficult for requirements tools vendors.

Oracle Buys Sun, WMware Buys Spring and You Buy Software

With a little bit of irony, just one year after having bought MySQL, Sun was acquired by Oracle. It is difficult to judge a deal that is not completed yet as the European Commission is still examining the merger. I am however afraid that the business and financial objectives of Oracle will largely lead to the reduction or the end of most of the Sun open source efforts and a serious slowdown in MySQL evolution.

Just after the future of Java becomes a topic of discussion after the deal between Oracle and Sun, WMware decided to acquire SpringSource and to give to this entity a stronger platform to promote the Java language. Since then, SpringSource has launched its Tomcat server version, Enterprise Java Cloud and Spring Roo. Previously it had acquired G2One at the end of 2008 and thus the control of the Groovy and Grails products. It is now surely the most important active player for Java software development tools.

Google is (also) a Software Development Tools Company

Google domination in the search engine world is well known, but as far as developers are concerned, it is amazing how Google is quietly occupying more and more space. Here are some of the software development initiatives of Google:
* Google App Engine
* Google Web Toolkit GWT
* Go Language
* Google open source projects forge
* Google I/O Conference

Google seems to have understood that besides the content, it should also be active in the plumbing that runs the Web. This is why software developers should be interested in what Google does in this area. You could do this following some blogs like the Google Code Blog and the Google Testing Blog. You will see that besides the well-known projects, Google releases a lot of interesting open source tools created by its development team.

Software consultants are people hired on a temporary base mostly for what they are able to achieve. They will develop part of a software system or manage a project (I don’t want to talk here about consultants that are just hired to produce PowerPoint presentations). They will also provide some knowledge transfer to internal employees that are new to a specific technology. On the other side, the goal of agile coaching is more often to improve behavioral skills. Sport teams provide the first example of a coaching role that could come to your mind. There are however some differences. The agile coach aims at producing a self-organizing team and he acts only when issues occur to suggest solutions. The sport coach has authority over teams. He directs players’ roles and activities, although you should not minimize the roles of players as leaders especially in professional teams. The situation of coach of individual champions is also different, as the athlete usually chooses them… and fires them also.

The current agile adoption trend favors coaching and the economic crisis could be a catalyst to change work practices. However, I have few illusions that most of the corporations’ managers are truly embracing agile values. Getting up in higher management is still predominantly a power struggle, with more political consideration than the goal to empower employees. Many managers’ main objective is to justify their job (did you ever wonder why there are so many meetings?) and creating a self-organizing team is not intuitively something that helps to achieve this goal. Upper managers mostly don’t care about the type of software development process. They want working software applications delivered quickly and for a minimum cost. They will pay for Agile practices as long as they think that it could provide what they want and “cure” the problems that they attribute to their current software development model. They did the same thing before with Structured Analysis, Information Engineering, RAD, Object Orientation, CMM, ISO 9000 or UML – RUP (you can add your own silver bullet approach in this list). The name of “coach” or “consultant” can be used for external help, but ultimately companies will pay for people that deliver short term results and improving developers working condition is not always included in the list of valuable results. This is sad for Agile and developers as it could be one of the few approaches that value “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools“.

After James Gosling the previous day, the Wednesday keynote was given by Danny Coward, Chief Architect of Sun’s Client Software, which means Java SE, Java ME and JavaFX. The topic of his talk was the top five points of both JDK 7 and JavaFX 1.2.  For the upcoming JDK 7, the main improvement will be on modularity; multiple languages (Groovy, JRuby) performance support on the virtual machine; some language addition like multiple exception handling; more I/O API; a new garbage collector. For the new version 1.2 of JavaFX released in June, the top five points are: release on new platforms like Linux and some mobile phones; more UI components; layouts; improvement of performance; better ways to use data with RSS/atom feed support and a simple asynchronous framework. He announced that another release of JavaFX is scheduled for the end of the year. The keynote was completed with some nice demonstrations of the JavaFX capabilities.

Refactoring of Large Software Systems

My first choice in the technical session was ” Refactoring of Large Software Systems” by Sibylle Peter and Sven Ehrke of Canoo Engineering . The talk presented the refactoring of the architecture for an investment banking system. After four years, the system architecture had become decayed, the original developers were no longer around and there were only few automated functional tests available. Important evolutions were postponed, as modifications often created bad side effects. However the application was very important for the bank and they wanted to keep using it for some more years. The first activity was to analyze the 1800 Java classes and their dependencies. The strategy was then to restructure the class content to separate clearly the services and the presentation functions using a service oriented architecture. The project, that has already consumed 10 men/years and is still on going, is run on an agile mode. Pair programming was an essential tool to ensure that refactoring practices where consistent across the team. The main customer engineer served as a “product owner”. This was fundamental for the Canoo team, as they needed somebody able to take decisions and knowing also the impact of the existing application on other systems. Another important success factor was doing the refactoring without modifying the functionalities. This allowed running tests comparing the results of the refactored application with the original system. Trust is an essential component of the project, as the users have to let an external team restructure their critical system… without breaking it. However as refactoring progressed, a team of the bank was also able to start evolving the system again. When release dates were different between the two team, a “branch and merge” configuration management solution was adopted. Some other lessons learned during the first phase were to have a large investment in automated testing and continuous integration, have an increased communication between the external refactoring team and the bank developers to synchronize architecture vision and transfer knowledge. It is also important not to underestimate the time needed to learn the system functionalities (where do you functionally test your technical refactoring) and test the final results. After the presentation, I talked with Sibylle and Sven to transform their presentation in an article for Methods & Tools. They agree on the principle, so stay tuned to get a comprehensive written presentation of their experience.

The Power of Value – Domain Driven Design and Value Objects

The next presentation was ” The Power of Value – Domain Driven Design and Value Objects” by Dan Bergh Johnsson of Omegapoint. Although I was initially a little bit afraid that this presentation contains too much code, Dan truly achieved its goal: showing how to refactor code to make it more understandable, even for domain experts without programming knowledge…. and doing it in a lively and funny way, which is important when you get up early to assist to a conference and the caffeine effect starts to diminish. His definition of a value object is “an object with data and behavior that has conceptual value”. His conclusions are that value objects help to decrease complexity (and compound value objects are even better), that entities relieved complexity and value objects add extensibility, testability and evolution. In the second part of the talk, he took the example of a part of code dedicated to charging a credit card and completely refactored it according the principles presented previously.

JavaServer Faces

The last presentation I saw was ” A complete Tour of JSF 2.0″ by Ed Burns of Sun and Martin Marinschek of IRIAN Solutions. They presented of the new release of JavaServer Faces that had its specifications approved at the end of May. Ed Burns recognized the criticism of the first version of JSF and announced that they have adopted a lot of innovations created in the community to integrate them in version 2.0. The new release is not a revolution, but a strong evolution. Among the improvement, he cited composite components; AJAX support, either declarative or programmatic; partial state saving that will improve performance; more system events; better resources management: full “library” concept, support for versioning and internationalization; the replacement of JSP by Facelets; the possibility to have bookmarkable pages. For the presenters, JSF is a real open source project (that is not a “just Sun” project) with a lot of different contributors. The new version is more much easier to use and well worth a second look. To complete this presentation, I talked with Micha Kiener of mimmacom which distributes IceFaces in Europe. Micha is also a committer to JavaServer Faces and his point of view is interesting, even if he suggested that it could be biased due to his position ;o) He also thinks that the community around JSF is strong and that the technology would continue to evolve even in the case where Oracle, that just bought Sun, decided to withdraw its financial support. He doesn’t see JavaFX as a direct competitor to JSF. His view on the market is that some products (JavaFX, Flex, Silverlight) target more the mashup, media, gaming or mobile market. On the other hand, JSF, GWT and their Ajax frameworks competitors are more used to develop applications with a “traditional” user interface, like on-line banking for instance. That is how JSF is used by some major Swiss corporations. He made also interesting remarks on the open source market and the commercial companies that try to monetize these technologies. He sees some products, like user interface or programming frameworks, more as “contributors” to the software development infrastructure. You can make some money in training and support as companies adopt them, but this stops when the company has its own competencies. Other technologies, like databases or web servers, are applications that run the everyday software infrastructure. In this case it is easier to sign long term support contracts.

I also had the chance met some of the Jazoon organizers, Christian Frei and Andreas Knobel, of Keynode. They were very kind with me and happy with the fact that the conference audience was higher than last year. There registered this year 1000 participants, around 50% of them coming from outside Switzerland. Videos of some of the conference talks should be available in July on Parleys the excellent conferences video web site. You can also stay tuned on our Java videos and tutorial directory where the will be listed.

This long introduction is there because in the Summer 2009 issue of Methods & Tools, I have three articles about Agile… and they are all written by women. As Methods & Tools had already received contributions from Agile women, I was wondering if, even if the manifesto first signatories are all men, Agile values were more on the “woman” side of the human being? I noticed also that you can find 6 women out of 13 members on the Agile Alliance Board. Women are a minority in software development. Checking if the relative importance of women was linked to Agile, I saw that the Project Management Institute board has also 6 women out of 15 members. This situation could then be more related to the project management aspect of software development than to Agile. Trying to find evidences of this difference of women/men proportion between project management and development, I checked the speakers’ list of major developer conferences like Jazoon or RailsConf. There I found a situation that was more inline with my experience in software development organizations: a lot of men and (very) few women.

The situation of women in software development organizations is not an easy one. They are a minority, have different values than their male colleagues and give more importance to their family life, this last point being in opposition with the overtime often required in badly managed software development project. The lack of women is also observed in the domain of open source development. Cultural bias could change in countries “new to IT”. A Swiss IT company with an outsourcing office in Vietnam reported that a majority of its employees there were women. The ratio of women in IT seems also higher in India. I know that men/women comparison is a “touchy” subject as gender behavior is a cultural topic with a lot of differences around the world. I am also not convinced that the Mars/Venus approach brings an answer to every question. It is generally accepted that men are more individualist and, especially in the IT field, introvert. Women are more caring and extravert, thus they should be more at ease with interactions and collaboration.

I don’t think however that the Agile approach has a “woman” side only for its coaching part. Agile has also practices that encourage open work context (pair programming, retrospectives) and individual responsibility for quality (test driven development). These activities require the capacity of being able to call itself into question, which is a women quality that men will call “lack of confidence”. Have you never omitted to test some code, thinking: “this is only a small change and I don’t need to run tests again”, just to discover later that maybe the apparent simplicity could have lead to a lack of concentration? ;o)

By putting back the focus on people in the software development process, Agile can bring a different perspective on the human qualities of project participants. Whether you are a developer, a tester or a project manager, you can however not be just defined by your preference for Mars, Snickers or Bounty. It is important to know yourself, accept your own limits and work with your team to build better software.

References

Agile manifesto

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus — Brain and Behavior of the Sexes

Agile Alliance Board Of Directors

Software Engineering: Report of a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee

PMI Board of Directors

Women’s contribution to FOSS development : discussion notes, slides and recording from my speech at Oekonux Conf

Software development gender gap pondered

Ratio of women in IT industry rising steadily

The Work Situation in Software Development

Borland entered a nondisclosure agreement with the new suitor and it has granted it access to its accounting books. Among the possible buyer, the name of Embarcadero and Oracle are mentioned. Embarcadero already bought last year the CodeGear division and might be interested for some new tools that will complete its current offer… for cheap. Oracle, who just bought Sun, could seize the occasion to create a more complete offer of software development tools around Java. JDeveloper, the Java IDE from Oracle, was originally build around the JBuilder technology from Borland.

In January, we asked the question “Will Borland Survive Yet Another Crisis?“, now we have the answer. And it is negative. After selling its development tools to Embarcadero in May 2008 and loosing 15% of its workforce and its CEO in January, Borland makes a final step to cancel 26 years of existence as a vendor of software development tools.  Best know for its original Cobol product, Microfocus expands with this acquisition its portfolio of software development tools. The same day, it acquired the automated testing products of Compuware.

It remains to be seen what will Micro Focus will do technically with Borland products, that are also mostly the results of former Borland acquisitions, and Compuware solutions. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of overlaps between the new tools and the previous solutions sold by Micro Focus. You could think that Borland and Compuware testing tools are operating on the same market, but most of the Compuware quality offer is targeting the mainframe.

Micro Focus is profitable according to its last detailed financial statements issued in 2008. It is also used to integrate acquisitions as it purchased last year NetManage and Liant in June and July. With these two new purchases, Micro Focus gains access to a new customer portfolio. Consolidating the acquired sales and support organizations with it own staff (or in more crude words: “firing people”), it could achieve what Borland was missing these recent years: profits. The deal could bring short term relief to Borland customers as it lifts uncertainties about the support organization. It remains to be seen if Micro Focus will develop significantly the acquired products or if it will just harvest the revenues from the maintenance fees.

http://www.microfocus.com/

Number of participants: 258
Ending date: April 2009

Recent trends in software development, like the transition to agile or the new technologies used for web development (ajax, rails, flex, etc.), should have been a factor that influenced positively the amount of training for software developers. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics “Computer software engineers must continually strive to acquire new skills in conjunction with the rapid changes that occur in computer technology.” In addition, the demand for software developers was rather high and the economy was mainly healthy in the past three years. Beyond salary, training is considered as the most important retention strategy. It is therefore surprising that close to 25% of the participants didn’t have a single day of training in the past three years. It is also true that 60% of the readers of Methods & Tools work for software consulting companies. Unfortunately, there are a lot of these companies that treat employees only as “cost centers” that could be replaced easily. Therefore their main objective is to minimize costs and they don’t try to have an improvement and retention strategy.

To be fair, it is also true that the attitude of software developer towards training is not always enthusiastic. Unless the training is directly related to their current activity, people will often hesitate between the interest of learning something new and the negative side effects of non-relevant training. You will forget quickly most of what you learn if you don’t use it and you get behind in your current work schedule. You can therefore not put the blame entirely on companies for the lack of software development training.

The fact that also 25% of the participants received two weeks or more of training per years shows that organizations that think training is good take the topic seriously. In a MySQL poll, close to 5% of the participants had a training budget above $5000 per year. For instance, a two day ScrumMaster class given by experts like Mike Cohn and Ken Schwaber costs $1300. With this kind of price, your budget could be consumed rapidly, even if the price of training should always be put in perspective with the potentials benefits that it will bring. A five days training course to learn Java as a new programming language with Sun is priced at $2000.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

How do you or your organization view the benefits of training courses?

CIOs Reveal Effective Retention Strategies for Skilled IT Staff

Demand for IT staff hits a five-year high

MySQL Poll: As a Database Developer or DBA, what is your preferred Training Duration?

MySQL Poll: As a Database Developer or DBA, what is your Annual Training Budget?

Mountain Goat Software ScrumMaster Courses

Java Programming Language (SL-275-SE6) Sun Course

Sun Press release said “There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris.” I think that this last sentence will reflect the main point of this purchase, as far as software developers are concerned. In his quest for getting a more important share of the software infrastructure of companies, Oracle acquires mainly a programming expertise and operating system that should complement its application and databases solutions. The hardware part should also allow Oracle to offer a complete optimized hardware and software solution to its customers, even if, due to Sun smaller market share, Oracle has to be friendly with its other hardware partners like HP or Dell. Acquiring Sun, Oracle also increase its expertise in the Java middleware area, after the acquisition last year of BEA Systems.

The other fact which is contained in Sun press release sentence, or I should say which is omitted, is MySQL. Sun acquired MySQL in January 2008, as a way to boost its software offer. MySQL has been for a long time an important issue for Oracle, as it was a big competitor in the lower end of the market for databases. With this acquisition, Oracle has the possibility of “quietly” killing the MySQL development process and offer the current MySQL paying customer an opportunity to migrate towards its own database product. I don’t see Oracle maintaining two database product lines, especially if one is mainly “given away” for free. Even if existing Oracle customers may not be tempted by MySQL, this new database was always in consideration for startups. There were also some companies that tried to build upon MySQL the missing tools to bring it close to the power of Oracle products.

We expect a similar fate, silent slow death through lower financial support, for mainly of the other Sun’s technologies: NetBeans, GlassFish, JavaFX or OpenOffice. Oracle always want to get the most of the financial aspect of acquisitions and spending money on open source projects and technology that has low immediate return on investment is not something that it would consider, unless it could be used as a tactical weapon against some of its competitors, like Microsoft or SAP for instance.

Sun Press Release
http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp

Even if the role of these external assessments is still important for the software development market, the rules have certainly changed these recent years. The software tool eco-system has evolved and the relationships between software tools vendors and developers have been transformed, both in their form and in their content.

The investments needed to launch a new software tool have decreased as a consequence of the diminution of the solid content of software tools. You are no more obliged to build a physical distribution network and to manufacture software CDs, boxes and documentation manuals. Everything can be available on-line from a web site and the vendor sells directly to the buyer, everywhere on the world. This model could be seen for instance in the Scrum project management software market where operates tinyPM, one of our sponsor. I remember interviewing in 1993 a manager of Cadre Technologies, a disappeared CASE vendor of the last century, for one of the first paper issue of Methods & Tools. He told me that the barriers to growth for a software vendor were high, because for every dollar you spend to develop a product, you needed ten dollars to sell it. I think that the relative marketing/product cost ratio has notably decreased, moreover if you target a market of small and mid-size companies. You can now promote for free your product to developers in a lot of blogs, forums and community sites. Things could be a little bit different if you want to sell to larger companies where you need more direct personal contact, but I think that the trend to less human contact will continue.

A second major change in the software market rules, is that some vendors are not selling software anymore, but only the services provided by the software. Amazon and other Web or Cloud-based tools vendors are not selling database software, but the service of using a database to store and retrieve your data, located somewhere on the net. The advantage of this solution is that you don’t have to install and manage your tools and your costs are directly related to your needs and activity. You become also more dependent on your supplier and this could not be without risks. The recent end of Coghead activities is giving its customers only a short delay to find another solution. On the contrary, if your traditional supplier has a problem, its software would continue to run on your machines for some time, leaving you more time for transition.

A third major difference is the growth of software-less software companies. By this I mean that companies like Red Hat or Spring Source do not sell software tools. They sell mainly the support and the consulting that goes with open source tools. This is not surprising if you know that the majority of IBM’s revenues come from its service division. On the other side, there is also the success of Atlassian that only sells software. Buyers do not fear that the quality of this open source software is inferior to commercial products, as it is true that the development of these tools is mostly as professional as commercial software in its recent evolution.

What will be the impact of the current economic crisis on the software tools market? Do these new market rules change something? I think that the new “nimble” vendors and their low-cost Internet models could have more chances to survive longer. The “no license cost” aspect of open source software could event lure people to switch from commercial products towards solutions offered by open source companies. However, contrarily to former slowdown periods where larger companies will buy smaller one to grab some new customers or technology, we should see fewer acquisitions, as it will be more difficult to have credit and less incentive to buy small companies in fragmented markets. The recent failure of Agitar and Coghead was followed by migration plans offered by competitors to their customers. McCabe then acquired Agitar. Larger acquisitions or mergers, like that was that is rumored of Sun by IBM, will be more likely.

DomainDrivenDesign.org is a open forum to share ideas and interact with other people interested in domain-driven design.

Apache Cayenne is an open source persistence framework providing object-relational mapping (ORM) and remoting services

Speed up your Web pages. Learn how you can make the browsing experience better for dial-up users by reducing loading times by as much as 80 percent, in some cases.

JavaScript Test Driven Development with JsUnit and JSMock. This article is a crash course in writing maintainable JavaScript.

The Role of Leadership in Software Development. In this video, Mary Poppendieck discusses of leadership roles in software development — what works, what doesn’t and why.

Practicing Testability in the Real World. This video presents a testability checklist that will ensure that core testability principles are considered while testing a particular feature.

Learning JavaFX. Robert Eckstein teaches you the fundamentals of the new JavaFX programming language, all in fifteen minutes or less!

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory or the software development videos directory

For WebSphere, the most important point is the recent acquisition of Ilog by IBM. Ilog has a strong solution for business rules management and the goal of IBM is to push this product to its existing customers and improve the positioning of WebSphere in Business Process Management. As both companies were already partners, there are no specific product integration issues. On the other end of the market, IBM is fighting RedHat’s JBoss with the free WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, pledging to offer competitive support prices for organizations that need it. There was also a presentation of the sMash, a product that allows to create rapidly dynamic web applications using PHP and Groovy running on an optimized java virtual machine. This is the commercial result of the work done at projectzero.org.

On the Rational side, the intention is to provide a native implementation in the new Jazz platform of products like ClearQuest and BuildForge. The next version of the Team Concert product will be improved in terms of enterprise reporting and global project management. The product is still developed using the open commercial concept, where the software is proprietary but the development process is open for customers’ input. As far as Telelogic products are concerned, they will keep their independence and industrial software focus, but they should also get more integrated on the Jazz platform in the longer term. Rational is also introducing a new consulting concept: Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF). The goal of this approach is to check how software development practices are aligned on business objectives.

With the current economic conditions, it could not be easy to sell software development solutions that require large budgets and important modifications of current practices. IBM addresses this challenge by proposing a modular approach that allows a gradual transfer to its Jazz platform and the use of open source solutions in the overall software development toolbox.

Participants: 392

Ending date: January 2009

Many software development concept of the 80s and 90s have left the spotlights of the professional press and the blogging world, either because they are soooooo obvious, as in “of course everybody is doing object oriented programming today…”, or because they didn’t meet the expected success, as the object oriented database that were supposed to replace this old relational SQL technology of the 70s….

CMMI is the successor of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) or Software CMM. The CMM was developed from November 1986 until 1997 as part of the software process maturity framework project. Then the CMMI, where “I” stands for Integration, replaced the CMM. This is certainly not currently a hyped concept. You will find no CMMI category on dzone.com or infoq.com and the CMMI channel on reddit.com has two subscribers. I was therefore surprised to see that the adoption, ignorance or rejection rates for the CMMI were very close to the results achieved by a similar survey on Agile approaches ended at the beginning of 2008.

I didn’t find any former statistics about the CMMI adoption, so it is difficult to compare the results of this survey with other numbers. These survey results are telling us that formal process adoption is growing in software development organization. The importance of CMMI numbers can be explained by the geographical diversity of Methods & Tools readership: an important percentage is coming from Asia where the CMMI label is important to sell outsourcing services.

Knowing that CMMI adoption rate is close to the Agile rates, I wonder also if there were some overlap, thinking that there are many companies without a formal process. I found a survey on Dr Dobb’s with some numbers on companies doing both CMMI and Agile. According to this survey, the rates of success of Agile and CMMI projects are very close, just above 50%. You could interpret the results as whatever the process, as long as you have one, you improve your success rate, which would mean that some discipline bring rewards. These numbers also tell that you have still close to 50% chances of failure, which could mean that discipline is not easy to achieve in the software development world. Please note that the Version One Agile survey seems to indicate a higher rate of success for projects, even if the type of questions makes direct comparison difficult.

Although there are some evidences that CMMI and Agile can coexist, the overall impression of people dealing with process improvement is that there are still important cultural differences between the two communities. Even if the non-prescriptive nature of the CMMI is recognized by agile developers, the overall impression is that this approach are still leaning heavily on plan-oriented and documentation processes, thus conflicting with the lightweight aspects of Agile. To contradict this culture incompatibility, there is the example Systematic, where a CMM level 5 company has added Scrum on top of their process, gaining a 50% cost reduction. This maybe not so astonishing if you realize that CMMI and Agile both try to achieve process improvement and both require discipline. Managing one week Scrum iteration with daily meetings should provide a strict control of project progress. Therefore organizations that followed the CMMI way for a good reason, that is not just for having a label to sell their services, should be naturally attracted by the process improvement tools contained in Agile. Other organizations than Systematic have also added agile practices above CMMI, but the opposite doesn’t seem obvious.

Maybe the software development world would be better if people could see approaches like the CMMI or Agile as toolboxes and not cult-like concepts that should be embraced with a blind faith… and a tendency to see other movements as “heresies” that can only be condemned. As Chris O’Brien (Software Capabilities Manager at Gen-i) says “So CMMI and Agile are complementary, but the use of either should to be based on business needs. I believe both have an immense amount to offer and co-existence will make sense for many organizations – particularly those that are capable of applying learnings from their industry with intelligence and care, to achieve results.”

References

CMMI Main page at SEI

Software and systems firms embrace CMMI – India Trends – Express Computer India

CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both!

Dr Dobb’s article: Agile CMMI?

Mature Agile with a twist of CMMI

Scrum and CMMI Level 5: The Magic Potion for Code Warriors

Systematic Gains Chart

Methods & Tools Agile Survey

CMMI articles list in SoftDevArticles.com

(r) Capability Maturity Model, CMM, and CMMI are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.
(sm) CMM Integration is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University.

Some of the recent interesting additions:

Distributed SCRUM as a Supplier – one year after

Taming the Beast: How to test an AJAX Application

Your Car Passed Inspection, But What About Your Software?