In an earlier post, I referred  to the Work Item Tracking iPhone app we are currently working on. The development of this app was motivated by our heavy reliance on Team Foundation Server’s (TFS) Work Item Tracking for internal projects. Using a web browser, our project teams (in Toronto and Bangkok) and customers have a real-time detailed view of  their projects. We felt having the same level of project visibility  via a mobile device would be very useful.

We wanted the Work Item Tracking app to work with any TFS without requiring installation of additional server module. Consequently, the app has to rely on web services to communicate with TFS server. This isn’t as simple as you may think. Microsoft considers work item tracking web services as too complex for third part development, and doesn’t publish the APIs.  Instead Microsoft provides a client component, which wraps the web services, and provides a .Net Object Model API. Fortunately, our team has been able to discover the required work item web services APIs.

Currently I am working on the module that gets a list of projects and work item types for each project from a TFS. I will include screen captures of this module in a future post.

Software development processes capture—in reusable form–the organization’s best practices and lesson learned, making them sharable across projects. Today, the benefits of process-centric software delivery are well understood. So, why is the industry’s adoption of software development processes so dismal? The lower than expected adoption can be partly explained by a phenomenon called groupthink. For this post I will rely on materials from James Surowiecki widely cited book: The Wisdom of Crowds.

The coinage of the term, groupthink, predates Surowiecki’s work, but he frames it concisely within the larger arena of group decision making, which he shows is more accurate, in most cases, rather than decisions made by subject matter experts. This easy to read book draws from and consolidates various scientific and empirical bodies of work from diverse fields–such as psychology, statistics, and economics–making the subject generally accessible.

For crowds to produce correct decisions, its members must be diverse, independent, and decentralized, and should have a mechanism to consolidate the individual judgments into collective decision. However, the decision making fails when the members of the crowd are too conscious of the opinions of others and begin to emulate each other and conform than think differently. This failure is called groupthink.

I believe commercial software methodologies have been suffering from groupthink. For over a decade, most efforts have centered around Unified Process with all participants—mainly methodology theorist and consultants-emulating each other and conforming rather than thinking differently. Any new development—such as Eclipse Process Framework or SCRUM—has been forced to fit in a UP mold. The practitioners have found these expertly devised methodologies irrelevant, and, hence, have mostly avoided them. At the same time, new practical ideas that arise during actual development projects are prevented from blossoming. The potential methods devised by diverse projects’ practitioners are likely to be more relevant, as they convey the wisdom of crowds (mobs) and consequently have a better chance of wide adoption.

The good news is that with the recent availability of integrated ALM and interactive process asset repository systems, it is now possible to involve practitioners in the end-to-end methodology development effort. I will cover this in more details shortly.

As if the development of software systems was not complex enough. It is about to get even more complex.

In the past few years, there have been much fruitful activities in the area of programming languages resulting in introduction of various languages. Although some of these languages have been around for a number of years, the recent availability of their robust, high-performance versions has made their usage in large commercial systems possible. Broadly speaking, these new languages can be grouped into two categories: dynamic languages and functional languages.

Dynamic Languages

For many developers strong-typed languages are too restrictive, contextually unintuitive, and verbose. Dynamic typed languages, on the other hand, are simple and elegant, ideally suited for rapid prototyping and development. They are specially well suited for time-sensitive development projects where time-to-market is critical.

Functional Languages

With the advent of universal deployment of multi-core hardware and the eminent availability of cheap massively parallel systems, the need for making concurrent programming mainstream has attracted much attention. The non-imperative aspect of functional programming results in code with no side-effects, well suited for concurrent programming. Functional programming is also very efficient for implementation of certain algorithms resulting in dramatic code reduction.

Multi-language Platforms

Aside from robustness, the new versions of the above languages are design to run on common runtime environments: virtual machines. This allows co-existence of multiple languages in a single software system.

Imperative type-safe object-oriented languages—such as java and C#–dynamic languages—such as Groovy and IronRuby—and non-inperative functional languages—such as Clojure and F#–can run seamlessly together on commercially available virtual machines–such as jvm and .net clr/dlr. Therefore, no technical barriers to development of multi-language systems exist today.

Example: Mobile Application with Cloud-based business logic.

Imagine a mobile application that provides sophisticated investors with instantaneous alerts based on news on or coverage of a company. Such an application constantly scans large number of online sources for any mention of the company’s name or reference to its competitors or general macro-economic events that can affect it. The system, then, analyzes the raw inputs and provides the user with a single metric indicating the effect of the latest chatter on the company’s stock price (positive or negative). Based on this metric, the investor can take appropriate actions.

Development of this system requires both mobile client and server side development. The client side could be an iPhone application implemented in Objective-C and UIKit.

The server side is more complex. It requires a concurrent component running on a massively parallel cloud computing platform that constantly monitors and filters large number news feeds, blogs, and possibly social networking sites. The analysis of the filtered information may require specialized algorithms some aspects of which require constant enhancements. These functionalities are best implanted using combination of object-oriented, dynamic and function programming languages

Process and Multi-language Development

Because of the inherent complexity of multi-language systems, software development processes and integrated application lifecycle management (ALM) systems are critical to development of such systems. Imagine the various categories of practitioners and skills involved. Each with its own unique development, validation and verification approach and tools.