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Michael Goulde, senior analyst, has joined the ADI team. He provides research and analysis related to open source software, development tools, and deployment infrastructure, as well as the related business issues. Learn more about Michael.
Agile development processes explicitly de-emphasize tools, but tools are nonetheless crucial to Agile projects' success. As more IT shops begin using Agile practices, the demand for tools that support these practices -- notably refactoring, test-driven development, automated testing, continuous integration, collective code ownership, and management -- will increase. Only lightweight solutions need apply for Agile shops' dollars, and even those will have to compete against open source solutions, which Agile teams largely prefer at present.
Enterprise application developers face greater complexity than ever in meeting business requirements. Platforms, architectures like SOA, and technologies like Web services have all grown more demanding, as have the underlying business requirements. Leading vendors are primarily addressing these challenges by building more comprehensive, integrated suites of tools and all-encompassing deployment platforms and by emphasizing full life-cycle integration, a strategy that appeals to one class of development organization but serves others less well.
No buts about it: Testing tools aren't cheap. Forrester's recent evaluation of automated functional testing tools can help you spend your testing tool dollars wisely. Our overall findings? Mercury Interactive's QuickTest Professional is the most capable tool on the market today, but IBM Rational is rapidly closing the gap. In the middle of the pack are Compuware and Segue Software, which are both well-established players, as well as Empirix and RadView Software, which are vendors of specialized Web testing tools. We strongly recommend modifying the Forrester Wave spreadsheet to generate a custom Wave graphic that represents your particular needs.
Investing in quality is imperative. Although having formal QA may reduce ongoing support and maintenance costs for software projects by as much as 50%, many companies shy away from it altogether because implementing QA requires more formality and maturity than they currently possess. For these companies, starting with quality control (QC) practices provides short-term value by inserting quality into the software development process.
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Dear IT First Look subscriber,
We have heard from many of you that you love the IT First Look but would also like more detail on specific topics that Forrester covers. We're responding with five new quarterly newsletters on topics relevant to technology leaders. The first of these will be a quarterly Application Development newsletter written by Mike Gilpin, the research director for the Application Development & Infrastructure team. Mike spent more than 16 years as a senior software developer and leader of development organizations and currently covers software infrastructure.
If you would like to continue receiving this newsletter on a quarterly basis, either reply to this email or subscribe here. As always, our newsletters are free of charge and you can opt not to receive them at any time.
Happy reading,
Merv Adrian
Your Paths To Service-Oriented Architecture
The profusion of vendor hype and definitions for service-oriented architecture (SOA) floating around the industry is often very confusing. Much of this is the natural side effect of vendors jockeying for position and an industry struggling to come to terms with architectural change. Some of the diversity is quite valid: There are multiple paths to SOA, each with its own characteristics and architectural priorities. To alleviate confusion, Forrester has identified six major paths to SOA:
- Simple internal integration
- Rich internal integration
- Multichannel applications
- External partner integration
- Core business flexibility
Your platform requirements and business benefits will vary according to the path(s) you are taking. As you build your SOA platform strategy, focus your objectives and map out your SOA path. This will give you a stronger foundation for establishing your initial SOA platform and later expanding it to support other SOA paths.
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Development Roles In The World Of Service-Oriented Architecture
Service orientation (SO) brings a fundamental shift in the IT delivery model -- aligning it to business processes and strengthening the business-IT working relationship. Application development organizations moving to service-oriented architecture (SOA) often find that success critically depends upon changes that affect people and process, rather than just changes to technology. This priority drives organizations to change the roles their IT and business staff play. In some cases, the roles will create new job positions, and in others, organizations will simply adjust the duties of existing staff members.
And some roles, such as business service champions (BSCs), drive fundamental change that realigns application delivery around a service-oriented model of the business, giving birth to the service-oriented IT organization.
From The Editor: The Tradeoff Between Simplicity And Architectural Richness
Welcome to the first edition of Application Development First Look! This issue's research is driven by themes of next-generation architecture and the trend to simplicity. There are many fascinating connections and relationships within this research, from practical strategies for implementing SOA to its organizational impact to the human impact and issues of complex development. This highlights the critical importance of process innovation, tools that fit the resulting Agile methods, and an increased focus on software quality to support test-driven development.
Carl Zetie has been writing about the upsurge of concern about the complexity of application development, which he covers in his report Trends 2005: Application Development Tools.
"If all these powerful tools and runtime environments are supposed to be so great, then why the heck is it way harder to build applications today than it was 10 years ago?"
They're mad as heck and they're not going to take it anymore! This is driving "the trend to simplicity," which affects many different domains, including application development tools (see also How Developers Can Conquer Complexity). For example, I took Carl's ideas and applied them to the Enterprise Service Bus domain, in the report Seeking Simple Integration? Try A Lightweight Enterprise Service Bus.
As much as we pine for simplicity, other forces are acting to increase complexity, such as the move from more monolithic, but simpler, models like client/server to more sophisticated and modular distributed systems built according to SOA. This tension inevitably plays out both in the strategies of companies that use this technology and the companies that build it, as in The IBM Application Platform Dilemma. Fortunately, future innovations are on tap to reduce platform complexity to minimize your pain.
Mike Gilpin
Vice President, Research Director
mikegilpin@forrester.com
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