Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Friday 5 October 2007, 7:45 AM
An Indian IT Odyssey
So I’m currently in Bangalore India under the auspices of Yahoo! to attend the company’s Hack Day weekend. I’m also on a mission to find out what makes the Indian IT market tick and try to figure out where it goes next.
So far my impressions are limited – having only landed a few hours ago. Apart from seeing two oxen pulling a cart past the front of the shiny new IBM building, nothing has stood out as exceptionally remarkable yet.
Well, apart from the fact that they want 200 Rupees an hour for Internet access in the room here – I think that’s about two pounds 50p in old money. That seems like a lot to be honest.
Anyway, time to get down to the nitty gritty of the event. If you have opinions on India’s technology growth feel free to mail me via the site.
Wednesday 3 October 2007, 12:06 PM
Shredding your data
BBC Breakfast had a spokeswoman on air this morning talking about privacy and personal data theft. Although she was giving it the dumbed down - “I know you’re still eating your Cornflakes and about to pile the kids into the Range Rover” - version, she did start talking about destroying printed material with your address or bank account details on it. What caught my ear was the fact that she said, “Well yes, of course, shred all your paper now,” and she said it in quite a matter of fact, throw away manner. Things really have changed huh?
So this comes in the same week that the Guardian newspaper reported that the European Commission is threatening legal action against the UK government for failing to properly safeguard individuals' personal data. Specifically, this is data that the government has on file about us, the citizens.
Delving a little further, I found that we have a body called the Information Commissioner's Office. This unit describes itself as the UK's independent authority set up to promote access to official information and to protect personal information - you can find them at www.ico.gov.uk/ They are sponsored by the Ministry of Justice if that makes you feel better.
No coincidence then to find my inbox lightly peppered with a couple of data privacy flavoured press releases this morning. So for a view from the industry itself, this is what Informatica was happy to go on the record with. “Globally many governments recognise the value that the holding and sharing of accurate data can bring in protecting its citizens, by improving security and homeland security tactics and reducing benefit fraud and the associated burden on taxpayers,” said UK MD Paul Billingham.
“However, the public's perception of this value will be seriously harmed if the government in question does not ensure that the data is accurate, is not corrupted when moving from one platform to another and that procedures exist to prevent misuse. The government departments that we have seen have struggled to do this when they are not equipped with the right data automation tools required for the job," he added.
Do you feel safer now? No, me neither. Are we getting there? Slowly, by all accounts I’d say. Will we be better protected in future? The potential is there yes and so is the technology – but it may require quite a sea change in attitude. From who though - us or the government, the banks and all the other corporate bodies who hold our personal data? I fear it may be the latter.
Monday 1 October 2007, 6:06 PM
Agile’s enterprise evolution?
As we know, Agile’s methodology for the creative process anticipates the need for flexibility and applies a level of pragmatism into the delivery of the finished product. Although it has plenty of critics (what? developer cynicism – no really, it’s there), Agile focuses on keeping code simple, testing often and delivering functional “bits” of the application as soon as they're ready.
The goal for Agile is to build upon small client-approved elements of the total solution as the project progresses, as opposed to delivering one large chunky application at the end of the project. To use a cooking analogy, being fair, I do recognise that to some, chunky style if far preferable to a puree.
But is Agile on a large scale feasible? Seeking a higher level of enlightenment here, I spoke to Borland following their keynote speech with BT at London’s Agile conference this week. To appease my curiosity, they told me that they have been working on a large-scale Agile project, with BT no less. It is widely believed that Agile is predominantly more suitable for smaller scale projects. But Borland’s Pete Derry gave me an insight into the scale of the their workings with BT in a bid to convince me that Agile can indeed work to a much larger scale.
Going back a few years, BT realised that the traditional method of using Agile was becoming outdated. Too often the original model was unable to change as requirements changed, often combining to create many of the industry’s typical project failure scenarios such as overruns, functional problems and busted budgets - issues that we read about all too regularly.
BT recognised that all their suppliers also needed to use Agile and so set about working on a fresh implementation of Agile with Borland. One of the key reasons for the success of this project (or so I’m told) was recognition of the key requirements the customer wanted and communicating closely with them. Well, you would hope so wouldn’t you? But it is of special importance here because for Agile to work properly, a very close relationship is needed between development teams and the business they serve. Vague requirements can only add to problems further down the line.
Throughout the project, Borland needed to keep a variety of stakeholders happy every step of the way. Using workshops, Borland was able to get every single stakeholder to agree on priorities of the project thereby circumventing the classic problem where each customer thinks their priority is the most important.
Fans of Agile will argue that it is largely common sense and that it is faster, more efficient, involves less capital risk, is more business friendly and creates a better working environment than traditional software development methods. Equally, critics of this methodology will mock its lack of design structure and piecemeal approach to overly granular level detail arguing that it fails to encompass a longer-term holistic view of the total project.
As for me – the jury is still out on this I’m afraid. Probably because of the fact that being a software application development journalist I get bombarded from every side all the time. I’ll leave it up to you to place Agile somewhere on the evolutionary scale. However, it’s interesting to see an Agile approach delivering benefits on such a large scale.
Sunday 30 September 2007, 4:08 PM
Glorious, Glorious Spam
Sniffing around for a topic of interest this weekend I came upon an e-mail informing me that Network Testing Labs (hang on a moment, I’ll come back to these guys) has found that in head-to-head testing, McAfee's single-appliance Secure Internet Gateway is eight times more effective at blocking malicious web sites, six times more effective at blocking spam and more than four times more effective at blocking malware than a combination of Barracuda Spam Firewall and Web Filter Appliances.
So these lab boffins looked for the ability to identify and block malware such as viruses, spam, phishing attempts, keystroke loggers, browser hijackers, adware, rootkits, dialers, data miners and Trojans.
The labs collected a suite of 200 malware samples and moved the samples to an isolated network designed to simulate the Internet. McAfee’s products blocked 198 instances of malware and let two pass undetected. In contrast, the Barracuda products blocked 190 instances of malware and let 10 pass undetected.
Now then, Network Testing Labs performs independent (it says here) technology research and product evaluations. Personally I’ve never heard of them and I was unable to research them on the web as they are quoted by so many sources that have benefited from positive “independent” reviews that I could not find their home page. Makes you wonder doesn’t it?
…and another thing, if they can be specific enough to gauge a security gateway as exactly eight or six times more effective than some other solution – how can they use a “simulated” environment to produce these results? This is like using a bathtub to simulate the ocean’s tidal movements isn’t it? The gargantuan size of the web itself means that we can never truly “simulate” it, surely now.
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