{"id":203,"date":"2005-05-21T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/application-development-strategies\/"},"modified":"2010-06-21T09:29:45","modified_gmt":"2010-06-21T08:29:45","slug":"application-development-strategies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/2005\/application-development-strategies\/","title":{"rendered":"Application Development Strategies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently attended a day of the Butler Group &#8220;Application Development Strategies&#8221; Symposium. I&#8217;ve just posted a short report on some of the more interesting discussions and presentations.<\/p>\n<p>Almost all of the presentations shared a reminder that we still have a &#8220;software crisis&#8221; &#8211; the vast majority of software projects fail to deliver to their original targets and estimates. The presentations suggested three independent, but not exclusive, approaches to try and resolve the problem:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Adopting better, more agile processes to address fundamental weaknesses in &#8220;waterfall&#8221; processes,<\/li>\n<li>Adopting better tools and techniques to improve development productivity and the integration of the application life-cycle,<\/li>\n<li>Enforcing a stronger &#8220;enterprise architecture&#8221; framework for development.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This last one was surprising, with several papers echoing my view that a strong architecture is essential if agile development is to succeed on a large scale or in complex and critical applications.<\/p>\n<p>There was also surprising agreement on things which won&#8217;t solve the problem:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No-one was promising a technical or product &#8220;silver bullet&#8221;. This includes web services!<\/li>\n<li>No-one was suggesting that we should just &#8220;try harder&#8221; with old-fashioned tools and processes.<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s no &#8220;one size fits all&#8221; solution. For example it&#8217;s a mistake to force a formal, high-ceremony process onto small business systems developments.<\/li>\n<li>Excessive technical standardisation is also not the answer. The drawbacks include &#8220;lowest common denominator&#8221; technical solutions and inflated costs where the standard solution is &#8220;overkill&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/\/thoughts\/application%20development%20strategies.asp\">Read my report<\/a> for more details.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently attended a day of the Butler Group &#8220;Application Development Strategies&#8221; Symposium. I&#8217;ve just posted a short report on some of the more interesting discussions and presentations. Almost all of the presentations shared a reminder that we still have &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/2005\/application-development-strategies\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}