Are we nearly there?

The first panel at the SPA2008 Conference addressed the interesting topic 'Is Software Practice Advancing' with particular reference to the last 15 years. In summary, the panel said 'Yes, just!' after considering programming languages, software design and project management.

There hasn't been much advances in programming languages over the last 15 years (new languages such as C#, Javascript were cited) although some languages have become more popular (e.g. Haskell, Ruby) and others are now only used in maintenance tasks rather than new developments. Tooling for languages has improved with such toolsets as Eclipse, Visual Studio and IntelliJ aligned with better compilers although it is debatable if this has produced any significant change (reduction?) in development costs. There is also an increasing number of open source tools which are free which is a noticeable change for development. Programming is still unpredicatble and the risk of things going wrong hasn't changed. While languages haven't changed, there has been some significant improvements in libraries and frameworks which lead to some gains in the development life-cycle.

COMMENT: I would say that there are an increasing number of languages which are now available and supported due to the convergence on to two development platforms (Unix (and all flavours of) , and Microsoft) as the use of proprietary systems has diminished. However, the days of the coder maybe numbered as an increasing number of tools can now auto-generate significant amounts of code.

Software Design also hasn't changed significantly in the last 15 years although the debates about OO notations being finally resolved with the release of UML. Maybe what has changed is the way software is now assembled as there is now acceptance that using open-source components and 'glueing them together' is more than adequate for many applications and demonstrates good software re-use. More complex (and better?) systems are now being produced although the design skill level hasn't changed; it may actually have decreased as design becomes unfashionable as the need to 'write code and get something working' results in formal design processes being side-stepped. The production of software architecture has improved and is recognised as being of value to all developments.

COMMENT: The rise and maturity of the open-source is now having an increasing influence on software developments - the development and adoption of standards has probably helped this. The rise of the web has probably contriubuted to the loss of design fomality. There is still no substitute for expereince when designing systems. The use of tools to support the design process, particularly for large systems which are adopting model-driven developments, could lead to some changes in the perception of design and result in changes in effort profiles for software developments as the emphaisis changes to design and integration rather than coding.

The final section of interest covered project management where it was remarked that some techniques have improved, the practice is still poor. Projects have got bigger and bigger and the probability of failure has only marginally decreased over the last 15 years (still >70% chance of failure). The widespread adoption of agile and iterative life cycles over the traditional waterfall life cycle has not been as dramatic as the noise made by the agile community would have us believe.

COMMENT There is no precise definition of what Project Management is as it can cover a vast array of activities depending on the size of the development. Some approaches have been made e.g. OGC, PRINCE, DSDM to try and formalise the activities but these don't adequately address a badly specified and procured system which are often root causes of many project failures.

Learning another language beginning with P

I arrived early at the SPA2008 conference so that I could attend a fast-paced (not my words!) workshop given by Nick Efford on Python and how it could be used to develop web applications. Having experience in using the other two P languages for the web (Perl and PHP), I was keen to see what made Python a better choice than the other two.

Nick started by covering the fundamentals of the language, explaining some of specific features of the language that were different to other languages including dynamic typing and the importance of layout as a way of implying structure (e.g. no } brackets for if statements, just ensure that the if body is indented). Clearly one of the strengths of Python is the ability to efficiently handle and operate on sets of data as tuples or lists.

After a explanation of OO-Python, a demonstration of the neat way that documentation can be created for classes and methods (embedding a method/class description in """) and a quick overview of the Standard Python libraries provided; Nick moved on to the various implementations of Python that are available including Jython (a Java version which currently lags behind the 'native' Python), IronPython (for .NET), CherryPy and Django.

Nick is obviously a fan of Django and demonstrated very quickly how a web-based application could be created quickly using the Django toolkit although I couldn't get it working on my Vista Laptop. One neat feature of Django that particularly impressed me, was the Admin interface which is automatically generated when you create a project. I also like the approach to documenting Django through the publication of both a paper and web-based book. Clearly I need a project to try and experience the power and efficiency of developing web-based applications using Django for real.

In summary, I felt that Nick had done a very good job at highlighting the advantages of Python and left me keen to try and experiment further, particularly with Django. At the end of the session, I left knowing a lot more about Python than before and I feel I will soon be able to add another language beginning with P to my kitbag knowing that there will be some applications where Python will make an excellent implementation language. It is also clear that within the SPA community, Python is a must-know language as there where many sessions in the conference were Python was cited as the language of choice to implement certain tasks.