Software development governance is concerned with establishing standards and control mechanisms to enable practioners in a development organization to carry out their roles and responsibilities while building or maintaining software development programs. A software development governance framework should not only facilitate the creation of processes that may act as a guide for project teams based on accumulated best practices from experience, but it should also serve to ensure that essential procedures have been followed. Therefore any serious attempt to establish a sustainable software development governance framework needs to build or reinforce these three key pillars: establishing and declaring software development processes, automating the enforcement of governance processes, institutionalization of compliance best practices so that teams are empowered to take corrective action earlier rather than discovering problems later where penalties may result.

When we started researching the current literature and tooling to help us understand the current state of art we were unable to find a single resource that elaborated how to transition from theory to practice. This has made us start work on a whitepaper that would dig deeper while giving an implementation model for software development governance. In this paper we aim to describe how it is possible to deploy a software governance framework including its automated compliance using a collaborative development environment. We use Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) to illustrate and give a practical recipe for achieving governance automation. After talking about setting up a governance process architecture we guide you through the steps needed to achieve a comprehensive, continuous detection and validation of process enactment and out-of-compliance events. To that end, we also plan to include an implementation reference model which can act as a base for your own specific implementation. By installing an automated governance infrastructure, preparing for internal and external audits requires fewer people and less effort.

I will surely blog about this again when the whitepaper is publicly available.

In recent years we have seen a trend of software companies, regardless of their size, realizing the benefits of having well defined software development processes in order to increase the success rate of their projects. One cannot argue that when it comes to software processes, one process does not fit all. With this understanding comes the challenge of how to ensure that an organization with a number of software development processes can ensure process selection is made properly.

At the very minimum, an organization needs to have a central place where consumers of the processes can view all available processes and search based on criteria such as process families (e.g. RUP) and process recommendations (e.g. team size). The richer the information included in this process hub, the easier it will be for interested individuals to find the appropriate process. By implementing this central place for processes, companies will see an increase in usage of their software development processes.

The next logical step is for an organization to promote its process center as a vehicle to improve processes through collaborative community input. Traditionally software processes are designed by elite group of highly skilled individuals, often in isolation. Without a feedback mechanism in place, there is no real chance for processes to evolve or survive. With the dynamic nature of software development projects and without the two way approach, processes quickly become obsolete and there will surely be resistance amongst project consumers to follow the processes. Organizations can easily over come this major issue by bringing together the process authors and consumers. Process centre can be a gateway for both parties to come together to share and collaborate on existing processes. The type of feedback can range from the most informal method such as rating system to most constructive such as recommendation on the specific process element or step. By having the wide range of options available, consumers can choose the method which suites them.

A natural way to implement this type of system is through the newly popular Web 2.0 technologies known as the second generation of web-based communities and collaboration tools. This trend in technology and industry addresses the need for collaborative way for the entire organization to work together towards evolving their software development processes and ultimately to increase the success rate of projects. I am pleased to say that we are currently working on a process portal based on Web 2.0 technology which is complimentory to IRIS Process Author. Stay tuned for more blogs regarding IRIS Process Central.

As soon as I hit ‘Publish’ on my previous post yesterday, I came across this very interesting announcement-
BEA Systems and Adobe Systems announced they will be partnering to provide Adobe’s Flex Builder 2 bundled with BEA’s Workshop Studio - this bundle due out later this year. On their part, Adobe will distribute BEA Weblogic Server evaluation instances with their LifeCycle Enterprise Suite (ES) offering - planned for early 2008.

An understanding is emerging that hosted application infrastructure- Web 2.0 or in the enterprise - cannot be considered complete anymore without inherent support for rich client application frameworks. SOA, web services etc. are enabling technologies but the workflow needs to include a sophisticated client that can leverage them - and vice versa.

Adobe’s also doing the right thing if you look at this from the perspective of competition. Microsoft’s Silverlight is already grounded on the .Net platform - With .Net 3.0 and it’s accompanying middleware technology set including WPF, WCF and WF- it now has a powerful foundation to lean on - not to mention a powerful development environment support in Visual Studio.
Adobe has it’s own middleware-like offerings (ColdFusion or JRun anyone?) but they are not nearly as ‘complete’ as the application servers such as Weblogic, IBM’s Websphere, JBoss and a few others. So they need this kind of bundling.

More on this announcement here.

A sense of validation is always nice - especially when you are so far ahead of the curve. I was scanning through my Google Reader Link Blog recently and noticed the number of new applications being implemented in Flex/Flash and Apollo - Adobe’s desktop runtime for RIAs.

Microsoft recently joined the game officially with the launch of version 1 of it’s Silverlight rich interaction delivery platform and while it’s some way behind Flash/Flex as a platform, it’s gaining popularity too - and has a lot of things going for it (a topic for another post).

I want to focus on Adobe preview of a new product last week at the Photoshop World - Photoshop Express, which is an entry-level Photoshop branded product aimed at drawing customers into the world of Photoshop. What’s special about Photoshop Express is that it’s hosted and implemented using Flex (the development environment for Flash).

This is a continuation of Adobe’s recent focus on the hosted model - Adobe had put out a hosted video editing tool, Remix that has been available as part of the Photobucket tool-set for about 6 months. This video tool has other nearly identical avatars - it also exists as Adobe Premiere Express and is provided on Youtube as Youtube Remixer.

This is the best possible advertisement for the Flash platform’s power. As a developer, there is nothing that screams out a platform’s strength than a complex image/video processing software implemented in it! And there are more coming out everyday!

Flash/Flex has been rounding up some well known names in its corner. I am very impressed with the way Adobe has targeted and honed the direction of the Flex/Flash platform after it adopted Macromedia. The AIR platform (formerly known as Apollo) which has gained a lot of steam since it’s launch is another crucial step in that direction.

What direction is that? Flash is no more seen as the delivery tool of the infamous banner ads. It is now perceived as a serious platform for rich and complex application delivery used by the big boys of the internet and increasingly, the enterprise.

Which brings me to the sense of validation I was talking about - Long before Adobe and the others, Osellus was one of the first “serious” product companies to recognize the power and potential of Flash as a platform and employ it to develop a complex visual enterprise-class product. IRIS Process Author is an enterprise-class visual process management product currently being used by very qualified process groups in very large organizations - and its primary authoring interface is implemented in Flash and the IRIS Flash Framework!! We just happened to start 5 years ago and given our early start, we had to develop our own framework for implementing our Flash-based interface. I was involved in designing and guiding Process Author’s interface over the last few years and so felt the need to make sure Osellus’s foresight was recognized - at least in a blog posting :).

Other examples of companies waking up to the potential of Flex/Flash are Google and Salesforce.com which have been adding some Flash-based products and APIs to their catalogs.

Considering our strong enterprise focus as a company, I am especially peaked by the strong uptake of Salesforce.com’s Adobe Flex Toolkit for Apex. Apex (Salesforce AppExchange) is of course Salesforce’s applications marketplace and one of the first implementations of the SaaS model.

On the consumer-internet front, Google made available the Google Talk Gadget a few months ago which is a Flash implementation of Google Talk that can be added onto your Google Personalized Homepage. The gadget can be even be added to a blog or webpage so visitors can chat with you right there in the context of your blog. Best of all, I noticed that it has the “Call” button - so you can VoIP with your google talk contacts right there - no need for the desktop client! I chatted up a couple of friends and was pretty impressed with the implementation. The gadget has a lot of other features too - like being able to play youtube videos and recognizing picasa albums.
The reason I highlight the Google Talk gadget in particular is that I was hard pressed to find a difference in the user experience between the gadget and the Google Talk desktop application. Of course this is as much as ode to the Google developers as to the Flash platform itself.

I suspect we will see Google employing Flash more and more in their upcoming “betas”.

Another web app that I am really impressed with is Virtual Ubiquity’s Buzzword. VU is calling it “the first real word processor for the web”. It’s written in Flex 2 for Flash 9 and is extremely sophisticated and rich in features.

These are but a few of the examples out there in the enterprise and web 2.0 arenas. All in all, this trend indicates the exciting albeit late recognition of a trend that Osellus had woken up to sometime ago.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing more and more of Flash/Flex and Silverlight based RIAs delivered either in the web browser or in an Apollo like delivery model in the next year or two. I itch to articulate my p.o.v. on the Flash vs. Ajax pseudo-debate that’s been on for the last couple of years but that’s a whole new post.

I am keen to know which other enterprise level products have Flash based interfaces, APIs or atleast components. If you know of any, let me know! I would also be interested in knowing about early adopters of Flash in the enterprise along with Osellus or even perhaps before us!

I would describe a process management lifecycle as generally consisting of three broad phases. In the first phase a robust process architecture facilitates the tailoring and blending of various methodologies to come up with a process that is suitable for specific domain, category of projects or even a specific upcoming project. Methodology experts, subject matter experts, process engineers and project managers are the typical kind of roles that would contribute in this phase.

In the next phase, these processes are shared with a wider audience. This is essential to get feedback and increase process ownership within the project team that would have to ultimately enact it. A process portal would ensure that the processes tailored in the earlier phase are versioned, categorized and available for review. It is important that there is no overhead associated to consume these processes. You should make it convenient for a team of practioners (who may not be process experts) to locate, review and comment on the process they are interested in. The process portal would also be the single location from where users can download VSTS process templates, MS project templates, published online process and printable (document format) process. To encourage a transparent vibrant process community, tools like blogs, ratings, newsgroups should be used extensively.

Finally, in the third phase, the processes are now enacted in real projects. With the advent of ALM middleware like VSTS, this next generation process enactment takes the form where process can now be instrumented within the tools used during the project. This not only ensures a friction free process enactment but also ensures data-based decisions on process enhancements as well as compliancy auditing.

Those of you who are aware of the work done by Osellus in the past already know that we have tooling & services to support the first and last phases described above. IRIS Process Author and IRIS Process Live facilitate process authoring & architecture and process enactment respectively. Now we are getting ready to announce the work we are completing in supporting the process portal layer support. In fact within the next few days we will announce a process portal within Osellus.com that would provide the support for a community interested in process templates for publicly available and open source methodologies. Stay tuned.