The cloud will change everything in five years

By Zvi Guterman

July 15, 2011 — (Page 1 of 3)
zvi guterman

You don’t hear the term “computer programming” much anymore, but it was the origin of software design and development as we know it. I’ve been doing development long enough to know that the process isn’t really all that different than it used to be. Sure, we’re no longer doing it on a green terminal connected to the mainframe as we used to, surrounded by other code monkeys (a term I use with endearment).

And yes, there are new methodologies, like agile.

Different tools have come along, but the process looks awfully familiar: conception, research, requirements, analysis, plan and design, coding, testing, deployment, then back to the drawing board.

We’re still code monkeys. And in the end, we get software.

Development has traveled a long, dusty road. As a developer and having led development teams for small and large software companies and for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, I’ve traveled down that road. Development has been an area ripe for disruption, yet incredibly slow to change.

It’s amazing how many companies still plod along the same path as a decade ago, fraught with delay, cost and fragmentation. For example, development still doesn’t “speak” operations, creating a start and stop to actually get anything through design and testing and into production. Many, many apps are orphaned along the road.

Fellow code monkeys of the world, we are stuck. With all that innovation, why?

Testing is a recognized development bottleneck, for one. Time goes into building the app, but then it takes time and money to get the right lab configuration ready to test and QA. Halfway through, requirements and parameters can change.

A CIO of one of the world’s top three banking organizations once described to me how its test lab was limited to 100 servers, which ultimately slowed the entire organization down.

Demand-generation, coding and deployment also could use a dose of speed. I won’t belabor the point: We all recognize room for improvement, but development change is moving at a snail’s pace instead of the pace of business.

Related Search Term(s): cloud

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