Software application development

This week I’ve been able to attend a Java SE training course at Sun’s Camberley campus. The primary reason I am here is that my better half is studying the course, so I figured this would be a great chance to work quietly from the back of the room if Sun didn’t mind (and they didn’t) to provide a few thoughts on how the company delivers its training courses.

First impressions were pretty good I have to say – the UK operations director was at reception to make sure I was able to get a delegate pass and a lunch voucher even though I was not a ‘real’ student. Once we had worked out where the coffee machines and the loos were located it was time to meet the trainer. Again, positive impressions here – he’s an ex Sun employee now working as a third party trainer. A nice extra sprinkle of impartiality perhaps?

Although Sun specifies that students’ differing levels of experience are pre-analysed so that a level playing field exists as far as possible, there will always be an inevitable difference in the aptitude of those attending. Luckily, course numbers are quite small this week and the trainer (let’s call him Brian, as that’s his name) is the sort of enthusiastic born-to-teach kind of guy that can work at six levels at once.

"Sun’s Java training programmes are carefully structured to ensure that the content is always pitched at the right level to be commensurate with the delegates’ skill set. But Java is a broad technology and in a real world development environment, solutions can be as varied as the problems they are addressing. With that in mind, Sun strives to make sure that course content reflects the needs of the software developers as they interact with these technologies on a day to day basis," said independent software education consultant Brian Earl.

This course (and others like it) is delivered with follow on web-based practice exams, which the company says help ease the route to certification. Our trainer pointed much of his content towards the desired end result for many students attending this kind of class, “This is the kind of area you will need to know about if you are considering professional Java certification,” he said, repeatedly.

Earl made sure he had some code up on the white board an hour and 10 minutes after the class started. “Developers get itchy if they have to sit around for too long without working on something,” he told me.

The corporate training materials here are written to welcome you in to the warm fuzzy world of the Java community and make you feel like you’re part of a winning team: 6 million developers, 1.2 million mobile phones, 1.65 million smart cards and 1106 members of the Java Community Process.

One reality check perhaps and something that kind of resonates of what chief executive officer and president Jonathan Schwartz said at JavaOne earlier this year in his press break out sessions – these courses are not cheap. I’m sure they pay for themselves so-to-speak if you approach them properly. But even if Sun’s open source offerings (OpenSolaris, Java, Netbeans, Glassfish etc.) are free, back in San Francisco Schwartz reminded us that Sun is there to make the technologies available and, “Sell you support when you need it.”

The chaps on the course seem to have enjoyed it and got what they wanted from it. I spoke to technology consultant Chris Madelin, who told me that, "This has been a good week for me in general. I'd say I've got a better handle on Java, both how it sits in relation to how I will be using it in my day-to-day work and the nuances of the language. I appreciated the fact that the trainer used lots of examples in relation to the type of exam questions that we might face when going through certification. He also pitched the content at the right level and enabled us to develop working examples in the classroom and discuss the worth of our work."

Just an additional point to mention here – if you have kids or know a young budding programmer looking for extra skills, Sun offers a certain amount of free training at www.sun.com/sai - if you click on this link you’ll need to select the Register option.

I’d be interested to know what readers think of corporate training of this kind and whether it is something that they constantly strive to achieve themselves. Skills for so many jobs (in software application development and in other industries) tend to be learnt on-the-job, so is this a topic that you think about regularly?

For some years now (well the last half decade at least) various vendors from the Business Intelligence space to the pure-play development behemoths have been talking about bringing in the influence of non-technical staff into the software delivery process.

It should not surprise you to learn that vendors who extol the virtues of these practices have put two and two together and said that the current economic crisis demands a renewed focus on these concepts. The rationale being that during these times of global economic pressure, input from the departmental managers to lawyers to financial or management consultants can help produce software that is more finely attuned to the economic environment in which it has to function.

Latest to the table with a promise to meet “the evolving needs of the business” is IBM with its Rational Quality Management Portfolio. Announced at 3pm GMT today, Big Blue insists that quality assurance standards in software will become more of an issue now and so this is where this product set is focused.

Pardon me? Quality assurance wasn’t important yesterday then? Well no, of course not. So has IBM actually put two and two together and made five in terms of simply saying that business focused software is ultra important in a recession?

According to the Standish Group, businesses lose over £200bn annually in software-related downtimes and 41 per cent of IT projects fail to deliver the expected business value and return on investment (ROI). OK, so you’ve heard all these stats before (or ones just like them), but are we going to start thinking about them more seriously now?

Built on its Jazz platform, IBM’s new product (which it describes as a collaborative "hub") is focused on integration and version control for quality management with a quality manager that it says will, “Ensure it is no longer the sole responsibility of the software developer to find bugs and deliver a high quality product to market.”

Yes – this is all very well, but do you trust your company’s sales manager to take adequate responsibility for debugging the potential defects in the latest build?

The route to better software, according to IBM, lies in a web-based centralised test management environment. Is this championing the value of non-technical employees just a little bit too far perhaps? Collaboration with business roles during the development process is undeniably valuable, but allowing a business manager (or even a CIO) to push a project this way and that (to an even greater degree) in line with the needs of the company within its particular market surely needs to be reigned in.

In search of some external opinion here, I spoke to analyst David Norfolk, who I know well from our time attending IBM’s Rational Software Development Conference in the US this year.

“The idea that a recession (or whatever we have is called) will encourage people to do things properly for a change is very seductive - not least to the people working in organisations where they are responsible for QA, governance and so on, who hope that they'll be taken seriously for a change", says David Norfolk, practice leader for Development at Bloor. “Of course quality is as important now as it has always been, but one has a suspicion that in times of plenty the cost of mistakes is sometimes passed onto the customer without him/her noticing - or, at least, that the customer can be distracted from failures with awesome new features.”

“In recession, waste (and poor quality is wasteful) is very obviously bad for your reputation and image. Perhaps the issue with IBM's new QM Portfolio is that if you currently have quality issues and the recession has driven you to address them, new tools won't be much help until you're introduced a development culture that focuses on the appropriate level of quality: Let's put People before (but not instead of) Process and Tools,” added Norfolk

Norfolk went on to point out that, "Business users shouldn't really be looking for coding bugs in software and micromanaging development (although as Paul Gerrard of the Test Management Forum says, information about failures is valuable no matter where it comes from) - but they are very well placed to point out where software solves a problem different to the one the business actually has, which is a much more serious quality issue than a few bugs."

IBM’s product is doubtless very useful, but its announcement did not specify margins for influence and set out just how much impact a non-techie ‘suit’ can exert upon the software application development process.

I’m deliberately questioning of course – and I’m sure there are more technical details available from IBM’s product pages if you care to go looking – but I think that a broad brush corporate sell of this kind of product needs more meat on the bones.

Who is IBM targeting with this news? Corporate managers that will happily absorb these kind of macro-economic marketing message – or the individual software developers who will need to use the products? If it’s the latter, I want to suggest that there a fair degree of scepticism will exist and IBM needs to substantiate its product announcements with more technical details if they want to be taken seriously.

I think the unwritten law of blogging states that if you hadn’t particularly been thinking about a topic and you get one phone call and three e-mails from different sources focused on the same issue – then you have to blog.

Yesterday, my contribution to the green ecosystem extended to recycling a few beer bottles and shredding some paper for recycling. But then, I received a handful of calls, mails and tweets questioning the green coding concept.

Essentially, I am asking: should developers care about efficiency in code creation from a processing time (and therefore energy consumption perspective) on top of their normal considerations i.e. just building a great app.

Of those that contacted me, one source was interested in looking into whether there is scope to lobby the Brussels ‘Euro-crats’ at the EU to champion the cause of energy efficiency through better software development for mobile Internet devices from smartphones & netbooks. I think the jury is still out on which OS we should be using on our Acer Aspire or Asus Eee – and with open source already doing such a good job for these machines, I don’t see much point in mounting a campaign for cleaner corporate coding in this space.

I asked Tom Raftery, lead analyst, energy and sustainability practice at RedMonk about this subject as he runs a sister site called GreenMonk. Tom pointed me to a positive thought on this subject that suggests that efficient programming is inherently energy efficient.

“Ask a developer what ‘good code’ is and they will very often say that it’s the maximum functionality in the smallest file footprint, smallest RAM requirement and least CPU utilisation – and that is essentially green (or efficient) software.”

Tom’s RedMonk colleague James Governer added, "Tight code is green code. Of course we wouldn't recommend that everyone go back to first-principle coding basics - but clearly thinking about memory and process utilisation up front, and perhaps using environments that are built to take advantage of concurrent low power muliti-core processors is a really good idea."

As I said, I received a bunch of comments on this subject from different sources. Also peppering my inbox was a note from a company called Verdiem who is shouting about a tool called Edison (cute), a “free” energy monitoring application that allows eco-conscious consumers to actively control their PC’s energy consumption. Verdiem, it says here, helps Brits save money on their energy bills and fight climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions from homes across the UK.

Apparently you can download this thing for free, but I’ve been trying to get on their web site all morning and it’s a case of “HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.” So that’s pretty efficient! You can download it from CNET here though. But it is Windows only so that’s a bit of a poor show anyway isn’t it?

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but humming banks of processors tends to make your average techie feel warm and happy. Getting some of these green coding messages might be harder than some people think. Right, must go and hire that Hummer for my trip to Vegas next week.

I am just in the process of upgrading from the 2004 version to Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 (why on earth do we Mac users only get a look in every four years!) and I’m wondering whether to take Sun’s StarOffice 9 into consideration now that it has native support for Mac OS X.

Sun is channeling this product as ‘suitable for small- to medium-sized businesses’ (well, why not after all?), but more interestingly it is said to include extensions that, “Make it easier to perform common tasks such as editing PDF files, creating reports, blogging and publishing wikis.”

This announcement probably wouldn’t have caught my eye if it hadn’t also mentioned the fact that Sun is also offering Asian language support in the form of the counterpart product StarSuite 9. Having recently worked on a project looking at Microsoft’s Language Interface Packs and having lived abroad for over a decade in the Middle East and Africa, I’m inherently interested in any project that extends application development to a multilingual audience.

I can’t think of a single developer convention I’ve been to in the last five years that has included a track entitled: “Developing at the core for multilingual extensions in the global marketplace.” That sounds like a real track title doesn’t it? I’ve yet to attend that session though.

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Free image source: Wikimedia Commons

Encompassing an “Esperanto attitude” and building in multilingual capabilities to Office-style applications (and other apps for that matter I guess) appears to follow certain themes. If you want to develop for subset dialects of Spanish such as Basque and Galician – you need to develop in Spanish first as the base language and then build extensions on top of that.

With the potential for so many idiomatic inaccuracies in an area like this, perhaps the fact that StarOffice 9 is completely open sourced (with the same binaries as OpenOffice.org 3.0) could mean that user contributions will help iron out any incongruent language issues. I wondered what exactly they meant by ‘Asian’ language support and Sun me gave the below note.

“StarSuite is available in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Basically if you need one of the languages above you have to get StarSuite - and also note that with StarSuite you get Western fonts so you can use English as well. No Hindi, which would actually be a StarOffice language (Arabic will be out in March/April as a SO language),” said Iyer Venkatesan, senior product manager, StarOffice, Sun Microsystems

Sun says there is also strong support for Microsoft Office (for both legacy and new OOXML files)… yeah, but I send Mac Word documents with embedded images to people (those, uh, PC users) all the time and they can’t open them. Will this really fix the problem?

Anyway, back to the issue at hand. Do we need to be more international in our general attitude towards software application development? The answer has to be yes doesn’t it? We know that it’s not just about slapping a new GUI on top of the core application to produce a new product. So do we need to define plateaus in lifecycle development cycles that pinpoint the appropriate point for internationalisation to take place? If we do – you don’t read too much about it do you?

Anyway, two nations divided by a common language as we are so often described; here’s my favourite definition of the difference between English and American from Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island (paraphrased because I can’t quite remember it)…

In England: we see a group of old age pensioners getting off a day-trip coach in their elastic-belted trousers and trainers enjoying prawn sandwiches for lunch.

In America: we see a bunch of senior citizens disembarking a Greyhound in sweat pants and sneakers enjoying shrimp subs for a snack before lunch.

I’ve been trying to follow the development of a few companies that offer online collaboration tools in the form of so-called ‘secure online workspaces’ for project development.

Of course I’m looking at these tools with an eye on developer collaboration as I’m meeting some key chaps on the Visual Studio 2010 team on Wednesday – remember, Microsoft wants to, “Democratise ALM …(to) bring all the members of a development organisation into the application development life cycle.”

But there are other players out there such as Huddle who play the hosted project management forum card so strongly that they say, “Don’t ‘reply all’. Use discussion forums to brainstorm ideas.” I believe this also contains a similar online document hosting service to Google docs too.

But I’m not so sure. I work a project with people from San Jose to Australia and I need people to use email alerts to tell me what’s going on, sometimes from a BlackBerry or other smartphone (so that they can view pdfs and Word docs) while they are on the hoof. Yes I see that in the case of Huddle there is a notification option via dashboard, email and RSS. But isn’t this overkill to just a tiny degree?

I need to retain editorial control over the pages that I work on and working with Microsoft TRACK CHANGES can be hard enough when you’ve got someone who just has to stick their oar in and make some suggestions so that they are seen as a valid member of the team. Sticking my documents up online for even more feedback is not really what I want.

Build motorways and they will fill up with cars right? Create more online work management forums and we just create work for ourselves. Don’t we?

This reminds me of a manager pal of mine, who, when faced with over lengthy mails from busy-body colleagues told me that he likes to simply reply, “Noted.”

This is a frustrating subject for me, as I want to be more positive. After all, LinkedIn uses Huddle as one of it’s chosen apps. To top that, the company has a small but growing developer zone – a prerequisite that some mid-market database or SOA companies (for the sake of an example) fail to create and promote.

But hey – who I am to knock collaboration tools? Everyone from IBM to university start up projects have embraced the concepts of information share, unified communications and community interaction.

Perhaps I’m thinking of a C programmer pal of mine who was looking for work and turned his nose up at the thought of any teaching or tuition roles by saying, “Well, it’s a good job, but I don’t really like people.” So there you have it: collaboration without personal intercommunication.