Home  Articles Changing Times
Changing Times  Kevin Parker's monthly look at the infrastructure of Application Development With 25 years of industry perspective Kevin has been framing and shaping technology direction both in the US and his native UK. He is currently Vice President, Market Development and Evangelist at Serena Software. He is a sought after speaker and spoke at 50 conferences last year in 11 countries.
Subscribe to this RSS Feed -  - Kevin Parker's Blog >> - Eclipse ALF Project >>
|
|
Thursday, 07 June 2007 |
 An old "I Love Lucy" episode shows Lucy and Ethel working at a candy factory. Their job is to take pieces of candy off a conveyer belt and put them in packages. At first everything goes well. Lucy and Ethel have this candy packaging thing down pat. Alas, things start to change. The conveyer belt sends out candy faster and faster. At first Lucy and Ethel try to cope. They try to work faster. Then their work gets sloppy. Finally, rather than packaging the candy at all, they resort to throwing it away, or even eating it. A quick leap of the imagination would show retailers struggling to get the additional candy packages on the shelf, customers refusing to eat more candy just because there happens to be more available, and the factory management struggling to get their supply chain responsive to the faster manufacturing process.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
Friday, 08 September 2006 |
Why The Industry Is Readying Itself For Radical Change
The first sign of trouble is the unusually long time it takes for your IDE to start one morning. Maybe you can't access the trouble tickets any more or the team members cannot build their applications or run the automated test suite.
There's a tipping point in our industry: it's happening now and the signs are all around us. The very fundamentals of developing applications are being overhauled, the priorities by which we have set so much store are being turned upside down, the methodologies and technologies we cherish are in flux and the self-evident truths of IT aren't, well, self-evident any more. What is causing this fracture in the plate tectonics of software development? What are the forces that are reshaping the landscape? What pressures are being exerted on the fabric of the industry?
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
Tuesday, 01 August 2006 |
Every tool we use has its own built in micro-process. Every development methodology we implement has its own macro-process. Our best practices for development are enshrined in the tools we use, the processes we follow and the ways we integrate all these together. When we get this right we can optimize the development effectiveness of our teams; when we get this wrong we risk quality, content and timescales. We all know we could do a better job at integrating but we are prepared to accept the limitations forced upon us and we come to depend on this fragile state of imperfection. When it fails, and it invariably does, what is the true cost of that failure?
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
Monday, 10 April 2006 |
|
If the "World is Flat" how come we still have bumps in the road of collaboration and communication?
When serendipity taps you on the shoulder I've found it best not to ignore the intrusion. I recently got back from an intense trip to India, speaking at several seminars and to a number of our leading customers. On my return I picked up "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman and this book provided me with a deeper perspective on what I had just learned, face-to-face, with the same groups of people I had just met in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi. And here we are in the second edition of Agile Journal talking about Offshore Agile Development.
Tags:
accountability,
agile,
applications,
availability,
collaboration,
commissioning,
communication,
configuration,
consequently,
considerable,
coordination,
counterparts,
difficulties,
dramatically,
effectiveness,
implementing,
increasingly,
infrastructure,
infrastructures,
interoperability,
interoperable,
interpretation,
methodologies,
significantly,
transitioning,
understanding,
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
Monday, 06 March 2006 |
|
Tool integrations are notoriously fragile; how can we fix this problem once and for all?
The first sign of trouble is the unusually long time it takes for your IDE to start one morning. Maybe you can't access the trouble tickets any more or the team members cannot build their applications or run the automated test suite.
Tags:
agile,
applications,
architecture,
architectures,
capabilities,
collaboration,
collaborative,
configuration,
functionality,
heterogeneous,
implementation,
independently,
infrastructure,
infrastructures,
interdependency,
interoperability,
interoperable,
orchestration,
orchestrations,
organizations,
proliferation,
responsibility,
simultaneously,
standardizing,
straightforward,
technological,
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
|
