From the Editors: The Challenge Of Software Builds

By SD Times News Team

September 15, 2007 —

Building software has been a challenge for as long as there have been compilers and linkers. Application life-cycle management suites include build functionality. There are all sorts of stand-alone tools, some commercial, some open source. Recently, spurred not only by the increased size of many software projects, but also by the stringent build requirements of agile methodologies, there’s been an explosion in high-end solutions for turbocharging build management.

Yet, as this issue’s Special Report makes plain, not all the benefits of the new technology have trickled down to where it’s needed most: the development team.

While we applaud the efforts of open source projects and solutions providers in creating new build software, the real challenge will be for development organizations to recognize that they need to invest—not just in tools, but also in people. A build engineer, development managers maintain, can be worth her weight in gold, because she makes the entire team more productive, and clears the path for developers and testers to get their jobs done more effectively.

We also urge everyone, from development managers to build management companies, to realize that build automation, while desirable, isn’t easy to set up or maintain. Every situation is different, of course. Some projects are straightforward, with a single language, a concise set of artifacts, and source code in a managed repository. Other projects involve widely heterogeneous systems, distributed teams, overlapping projects, and source code with a variety of licenses. Automated build management can be a savior…but except in simple cases, it’s not plug-and-play.

The overarching message: Don’t neglect build management. While architecture, coding and testing may have higher visibility throughout the application life cycle, they’re meaningless without the proper investment in software build technology and processes. Invest wisely.

Lotus 1-2-3 Macros, All Over Again
Software developers “of a certain age” may remember, with varying degrees of fondness, the release of Lotus 1-2-3, the killer-app spreadsheet for IBM PCs. One of Lotus 1-2-3’s key features was its macro capability, which allowed users to embed fairly sophisticated logic into spreadsheets.

What happened, in one company after another, is that a line-of-business person discovered Lotus 1-2-3 and eventually started writing macros. The macros grew and grew and grew. And then, one day, they broke. Guess who had to fix them, and maintain them going forward? Too often, it was the IT department’s programmers. Their long-suffering response: “Why didn’t you ask us to get involved earlier?” However, as we all know, it was much easier for an end user to do something himself (even if it was done badly) than to get official approval for the project; IT was there to clean up any mess.

History has repeated itself many times, as business users began using various applications and Web sites for business purposes. And it’s going to repeat itself again, thanks to technologies like Vail, a new business mashup tool and SaaS offering from Serena. Business users are going to jump all over tools like Vail, and many will take the skunkworks approach, making mashups without engaging the IT department. But ultimately, we know that the enterprise software developers will be tasked with embracing, extending and supporting the mashups that these users create.

Our advice: Get ahead of the trend. Don’t wait for your end users to discover the potential of mashups, and for them to begin building business-critical applications without knowledge, training, documentation, security and standards. Down that path madness lies.

Instead, embrace the new technology first. If end users want to build their own mashups, then train and support them, instead of pushing them underground. Nobody wants to relive the Lotus 1-2-3 macro nightmare again…and we don’t have to.

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