There have been quite a few development posts in our blog as of late, so I thought I’d share some current activities from our products and services front.

In the past month, we welcomed three new customers to our IRIS Product Suite and Content Bridge for VSTS, including a large Canadian Federal government agency. Two of the customers were specifically looking for a solution to bring RUP or RUP-inspired methodology into VSTS for process enactment. After evaluating their requirements, we selected the right tool from our product family and provided our expertise in this area to deliver the needed solutions for them.

As VSTS continues to gain maturity as an ALM tool, we have noticed growing interest in processes and process integration within the development environment to facilitate its enactment. Organizations who have adopted TFS initially for centralized source control and automated build capabilities are now ready for more. After having deployed and migrated existing projects to VSTS, many are looking into bringing their own processes into the tool to benefit from process guidance and work item tracking in their daily development activities.

However, creating process templates for proprietary processes remains a challenge. In this regard, it is a pity that a process tool, such as RMC, does not provide cross-platform support to generate process templates that can be used in a (competitor) enactment platform.

I believe that a well-rounded process tool should not only satisfy the modeling needs of process authors, but also provide the necessary support to help project teams deploy and implement processes in a chosen enactment tool, whichever it may be.

For those who are interested in seeing an RUP process template live in action in VSTS, here is a recording of a webinar that we hosted with Microsoft last year. In this webinar, I used an RUP Process Template for Small Projects as an example to create a project in VSTS.

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.

I have been reading Payman’s posts over the past week and the No new Methodology Please; Let’s focus on Tools post in particular stuck with me because it focuses on something I have been thinking about too. His post talks about the noise in the processes domain where there is a lot of focus on coming up with unnecessarily niche processes rather than focus on actually making processes useful by developing tools that make employing existing mature processes practical.

While Payman’s post focuses on processes, it struck me that even where tools go, often companies employ ALM tools with a narrow focus without fully grasping how they can be fully leveraged and what capabilities these tools pack. Over the last year, we have helped design and deploy solutions based on Microsoft Visual studio Team System (VSTS) for a few customers. One of the key needs that kept leaping out at us from all these engagements is that most customers wanted a way to implement requirements traceability – and they were not always aware that most ALM tools already have the capability to implement end-to-end Requirements Management – in particular traceability.

VSTS for example provides advanced linking capabilities that can be leveraged to allow tracking execution of a requirement from beginning to end (and backwards as well). A number of tools have come up around VSTS to satisfy other aspects of traceability such as the ability to track and link requirements within documents – document traceability.  Traceability has always been this much sought after goal – which many companies have been attempting to address in their tools for many years. Now, the tools exist but most of us are not aware how to leverage them or even that the capability exists.

Over the following few weeks, I am thinking of putting up a series of blog posts focusing on Traceability to think through for myself and others who are interested in Traceability – how to leverage tools – with particular focus on VSTS since I am most familiar with it. A recent solution we implemented for a customer involved integrating VSTS with their CRM solution so that the solution was now truly end-to-end : Right from the time the requirement came in from the customer. In a future post, I hope to outline the lessons we learnt from this particular implementation and also step back to examine the broader implications and advantages of implementing such integrations.

We are also discussing the possibility of perhaps even having a series of webinars that focus on various aspects of Traceability based on our experience over many projects over the years and  how we can leverage VSTS for the purpose.

Watch this space.