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It is not often you have the chance to coin a phrase, especially by accident. Yet occasionally a person is faced with a situation in which they are talking about an event or relationship that has no good descriptive name, and are forced to make up their own. This was the case when I was trying to explain to my peers the relationship that existed between Software Reliability and Software Maintainability. And thus Developmental Integrity was born…
Lately, there has been some heated discussion in the software engineering community about what it means to write maintainable code. The concept of architecting and designing software so that it is more easily maintained is rooted in the desire to keep support costs down for the customer.
Much of the recent discussion was spurred by a jdn blog about developing a software application that will be maintained by developers who are unfamiliar with current practices.
For many organizations, the growing Web 2.0 movement sets up an inevitable showdown with the IT department. The biggest benefits of Web 2.0 – employee collaboration, audience participation and management transparency, to name a few – directly conflict with the highly-structured, control-driven IT world. This point was further illustrated in a recent McKinsey Global survey of executives (reported by Business Week).
Salesforce.com, a fast-growing on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) company, is rapidly broadening its scope to become more of a complete sales, marketing and customer service system provider. In doing so, it is likely to attract increased competition from some bigger rivals. According to this Business Week article, Salesforce.com grew 76% in 2005, 60% in 2006, and is expected to see 45% growth this year. That means quadrupling in size in three years! And talk about guerrilla marketing: their stock symbol on the NYSE is CRM.
Stories abound reporting the decline of traditional television, but if Steve Rubel is correct, TV might be entering a new golden age. Rubel claims there have been two great software development platforms:
1) The personal computer
2) The programmable web
Rubel predicts the next big development platform will be television, and he makes a good point. Until now, the broadcast networks, cable companies and satellite programming have provided almost all the scheduled content options on television. But with the advent of Apple TV and other new options, consumers may soon have an almost limitless range of options from which to choose, and software is the key to making that happen (see 57,000 Channels and Nothing On).