Should Developers Come Only from Mars but Project Managers from Venus?
Published June 23rd, 2009 Under Humour, Methods & Tools, Software Development | 1 Comment
Once upon a time was the “software crisis” that persuaded people to “engineer” software in a 1968 NATO conference. Methods were created to structure the requirements and the software development process. They use models to define more precisely the requirements and the target system. They had a top-down approach that was aimed at increasing management control on projects. The object oriented revolution changed the perspective of the models with the subsequent creation of the UML, but not the industrial vision of the software development process. In 2001, 17 people signed an agile manifesto that tried to push back the balance more on the “people” side. Two of the main value preferences of the manifesto (“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”) are explicitly focused on people and their relationships. Read more
Another Suitor for Borland?
Published June 11th, 2009 Under News, Software Development | Leave a Comment
According to Reuters, Micro Focus, which agreed in May to buy Borland, said on Monday that Borland had received a preliminary non-binding indication of interest from an unnamed financial buyer. The price offered would be $ 1.20 versus the $ 1 offered by Micro Focus. If the transaction is not approved by the shareholders, Borland would have to Micro Focus $3 million.
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.
More than 1000 items in the Software Development Links Directory
Published May 18th, 2009 Under Links, Methods & Tools, News, Software Development | Leave a Comment
The Software Development Links Directory has now more than 1000 items listed. SoftDevLinks.com is a new general directory for software developers, testers and managers. If you have a blog, a web site, distribute a tool or work a consulting company related to software development, do not hesitate to add one or more (free) link(s) in this directory. Get enhanced visibility with reciprocal links.
Hungry Micro Focus Eats Borland Cadaver (and More)
Published May 7th, 2009 Under News, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Borland Software Corporation announced that Micro Focus International plc and Borland have entered into a definitive agreement under which Micro Focus will acquire all the outstanding shares of Borland in a cash merger transaction. Micro Focus will acquire each outstanding share of common stock of Borland for $1.00 per share, representing a premium of 25% over the closing share price of Borland’s common stock on May 5, 2009 of $0.80 and a premium of approximately 67% over the average thirty trading day closing price of $0.60. The aggregate transaction value is approximately $75 million.
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.
Software Development Training Survey: Between Ugly and Good
Published April 27th, 2009 Under Numbers, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Our question was: How many weeks of training have you followed on average the past 3 years??
| None | 23% |
| Less than one week | 19% |
| One week (5 days) | 15% |
| One to two weeks | 18% |
| Two weeks to one month | 8% |
| More than one month | 17% |
Number of participants: 258
Ending date: April 2009 Read more