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A multi-cloud strategy reduces vendor lock-in and outage risks. But to
realize those benefits, development teams must first design apps to successfully run on various platforms.
In software development today, the cloud is a fact of life. And, increasingly, enterprises plan their application architectures across multiple public cloud providers, rather than just one.
A key driver behind multi-cloud adoption is increased reliability. In 2017, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service went down due to a typo in a command executed during routine maintenance. In the pre-cloud era, the consequences of an error like that would be relatively negligible. But, due to the growing dependence on public cloud infrastructure, that one typo reportedly cost upwards of $150 million in losses across many companies.
A multi-cloud app — or an app designed to run on various cloud-based infrastructures — helps mitigate these risks; if one platform goes down, other steps in to take its place. Continue reading
In the mobile device world, there is no such thing as one size fits all. Although just two mobile platforms dominate the market today – Android and iOS – applications will need to work well on devices of all shapes and sizes, from the sleekest smartphones to the bulkiest tablets.- Mobile app development
Apps might also need the ability to support new classes of a mobile device as and when they take off, such as smartwatches or augmented reality viewers such as Microsoft’s HoloLens. And the explosion of fixed and mobile connected sensors and appliances – the internet of things (IoT) – opens up countless opportunities
to develop ever more useful mobile apps that control and/ or communicate with these devices to enable innovative capabilities and services.
So how do organizations achieve the agility they need to develop useful and compelling mobile apps and services, in a timely and repeatable way, that continually delight customers? Should they opt for cross-platform web apps or create separate native apps for Android and iOS, optimized for different-sized devices? And what is the best way to organize development teams and processes? Among those at the forefront of mobile innovation, opinions on the most productive approaches to mobile development vary, but it is possible to draw out some common threads.
On the question of whether it is better to develop native apps or go for a cross-platform approach, there is no right or wrong answer – it depends on the business’s needs and its customers’ preferences. Many organizations deploy both.
Innovation consultant Nick Lansley spent three decades at Tesco, including over 10 years as head of research and development and latterly as head of open innovation at Tesco Labs. Having talked to many customers, he believes that although there are pros and cons to both the native and cross-platform approaches, native apps generally offer
the most advantages for retailers. Continue reading
Demands for digital transformation in business may ring hollow to some architects. However, componentization can play a key role in making business innovation a reality. – Software engineering
Architects and developers have too many priorities and too many high-level goals as it is. The introduction of broad business imperatives, such as application modernization and digital transformation, do little to create a technical approach or define a software architecture.
The best way to really approach these demands is to get your terms straight, frame applications along modern cloud component lines, introduce component-based software engineering to make processes match business needs and recognize productivity and technology trends as equals.
A primary technical step in creating a business transformation bridge is to focus on component-based software engineering, part of which involves having a componentization strategy. Componentization is driven by two forces: functional requirements from the business transformation side and technical requirements from the application modernization side.
The functional side of componentization is created by the tasks workers perform and the application tools they use. The goal of functional componentization is to create components at the highest level and avoid a specialization of functions that limit sharing components among applications. Continue reading
It seems like every year will be — or at least should be — the year of software engineering quality, but somehow 2018 feels different. Pride in workmanship is what drives developers to create better software, and that can’t be
standardized.
A 2017 survey conducted by research firm Coleman Parkes for the software analysis and measurement company Cast asked developers what factors led them to produce high-quality software. Respondents didn’t cite industry standards much (just 8%) and instead said they were inspired by pride in workmanship (20% of those surveyed).That’s great, as far as it goes, but Bill Curtis, chief scientist at Cast, said much bigger forces will also put software engineering quality under the microscope.
Security breaches and app failures mean quality is now a boardroom-level issue, he said, and that will mean sweeping changes in software development trends. In 2017, just one-third of developers were actually graded on software engineering quality, the Cast survey showed. That will change. “IT organizations will demand greater accountability from their software suppliers and will request a certification of code quality, with penalties when it is insufficient, in 2018,” Curtis said.
Software engineering quality has been completely insufficient for far too long, according to app users, said Theresa Lanowitz, head analyst at Voke Research. Consumers are tired of apps that don’t work, and she tied that directly to the trend in software development to focus on speed rather than quality. Continue reading
Enterprises need software competency to deliver good digital experiences. Agile development is how enterprises get there. Every software development organization today seems to practice the agile software development methodology or a version of it. Or at least they believe they do. – Modern software development 
Whether you are new to application development or learned about software development decades ago using the waterfall software development methodology, today your work is at least influenced by the agile methodology.
But what exactly is agile methodology, and how should it be practiced in software development?
Agile was formally launched in 2001 when 17 technologists drafted the Agile Manifesto. They wrote four major principles for developing better software:
Old hands like me remember the days when the waterfall methodology was the gold standard for software development. The software development process required a ton of documentation up front before any coding was done. Someone first wrote a business requirements document that captured everything the business needed for the application. These documents were long, detailing everything: strategy comprehensive functional specifications, and visual user interface designs. Continue reading
Software development is a tedious process and can often be challenging. The process consists of various successive phases which have to be performed in an organized manner. – Software developers
Custom software development includes heavy consideration to requirements, a focus on overall objectives, the creative design process, and the actual process of writing the code necessary to ensure optimal software functionality. Unfortunately, many software development projects ultimately fail due to poor execution.
Before embarking on the development process, it’s essential to have your custom software project completely outlined and organized. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll introduce you to 10 questions to ask when developing software. Not only will these questions aid in outlining the purpose and intent of the software, but also in the successful execution and completion of your software development project.
Before beginning your custom software development project, it’s imperative that you know and understands the most common mistakes made in the development process. By becoming familiar with these mistakes before the initiation of the project, you will be better able to avoid making the same ones. Continue reading
Multi-cloud, blockchain and more sophisticated PaaS tools are three trends expected to reshape app development practices in 2018. Is your team ready for the change? – App development
Experts expect 2018 to be a year of change for cloud app development, as trends like DevOps, hybrid cloud and blockchain continue to take off.
Here’s a closer look at these and other emerging trends, what they’ll mean for enterprise app development teams and the potential challenges and risks they pose.
In 2018, vendors will attempt to improve their platform as a service (PaaS) offerings to speed up application development and support DevOps workflows. Leading cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, will continue to roll out tooling to automatically provision PaaS-like capabilities via containers and Kubernetes. In addition, CIOs and app development teams will start to take advantage of higher-level service mesh tools, such as Istio and Linkerd, to recreate the benefits of monolithic apps within a collection of microservices.
However, these more sophisticated cloud tools come with potential vendor lock-in risks, said David Bartoletti, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. For example, AWS provides a set of tools to automatically provision containers with its Elastic Container Service, but those tools won’t necessarily help developers who need to move apps to private infrastructure or manage apps that span cloud platforms. Continue reading
Application Architectures: for many organizations, the existing architecture, and systems that support customer- or employee-facing apps are outdated and cannot be scaled or built upon as quickly as required by today’s realities—especially when it comes to
supporting the demands of mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Companies may want to develop new apps, create new customer experiences or expose data to partners or third-party developers, but tremendous improvements to infrastructure, process, management, connectivity, and security are needed to support that plan. This problem is exacerbated when working with partners that use different protocols and databases, making it difficult to connect efficiently.
A new digital transformation layer is needed to help benefit from investments in mobile and IoT, integrate new acquisitions or optimize the partner supply chain. Continue reading
Open source development brings speed and creativity, but it can also fundamentally change how users employ tech. MIT’s Open Agriculture Initiative illustrates this point. – Modern app development
BOSTON — During conversations about open source technology for developers, common words included speed, experimentation — and empathy.
Yes, empathy is a key to open source success, according to folks at Red Hat Summit 2017. The idea rests on the notion that while development speed is great and innovation is necessary — both hallmarks of open source work and modern app development, vendors said — programmers must also stay aware about how next-generation technology can affect users.
The work of the Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg) at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., offers a good example. The OpenAg project works with Red Hat to develop open source agricultural software, with the goal of creating a more agile way to encourage food production among small, local communities.
In other words, residents in a city borough might someday be able to use open source tech and modern app development strategies to grow their own food. Technologists currently undertake that activity in the MIT Media Lab by studying digital farming and plant physiology, growing broccoli via an IP address attached to sensors.
Caleb Harper, director and principal investigator at OpenAg, told attendees at the Red Hat Summit that digital transformation technology could make it possible to introduce 1 billion new farmers into urban neighborhoods along the way to establishing digital growing areas. Continue reading
There’s a lot of information about DevOps out there, making it hard to determine exactly what it means. However, there are still key principles you can stick to in order to achieve success through DevOps. Here are four questions that, according to our experts, you should be asking when thinking about your DevOps strategy.
DevOps tasks should be clearly connected to the applications they support, and businesses should, in turn, identify the business processes those applications support. This lets organizations map out what is referred to as a zone of business impact for each DevOps process, and it’s a fundamental part of DevOps documentation. That way, as expert Tom Nolle points out in his piece on the connection between DevOps and enterprise architecture, the impact any DevOps strategy has on business processes — even if the impact is simply a risk of disruption — can be planned for ahead of time. This will also ensure that development teams understand the business process lifecycle or even lifecycles, that their application may impact.
Implementing continuous delivery means that changes to your application are created and deployed on an ongoing basis. If your apps are not being delivered continuously, it’s important to start thinking about building a continuous delivery pipeline for them by making sure that everyone involved in app development and delivery is working together. According to expert Chris Tozzi in his piece on applying DevOps principles to app modernization, part of this means ensuring you have the infrastructure tools in place to roll out changes quickly from development to production. Continue reading