In the past I've talked about the need to enable a new development model... something in which the agility is shared between the developers and the IT department. Recently I read this article on a move toward ASP's and the inherent pace that can be achieved where an ASP is the software companies primary target:

BeyondVC: ASPs/Service Providers:

“In the time it takes Microsoft to deliver an application (went from 1 year to 5 years), a company delivering software as a service can deliver 60 iterations of its product. As Adam points out, ”things that breed rapidly more quickly adopt through natural selection to a changing environment.“ I have never thought about software in evolutionary terms, but it certainly makes sense.”

This really brings home some of the key points around the ability to create agile business processes, through an evolutionary approach and constant refinement. One thing that I think that a utility centric approach to development in which the develop->deploy paradigm is both iterative and shares a common runbook is the ability to “try things out” and have the digital runbook (the functional and systemic design for a production system - like our N1 technology enables) become aware of successes and failures. This builds upon the patterns and micro-architecture work done by the patterns community, but adds a learning path which allows knowledge/experiences to be documented and preserved - not in the developers per-se, but in their annotations within the design.

I think that one of the things that may be holding some developers back is the fact that their development environments are frequently substantially different from their deployed environments... something that I think Sun Grid has the opportunity to change... why not instantiate a developers instance(s) of a web server (ours, theirs, open - whichever containers have deployment plans for the Sun Grid), app server (ours, theirs, open...) and db container(s) on the grid, attach to it from Java Studio Creator... do intial development, and gather statistics. Begin to instantiate additional elements of infrastructure: identity, entitlements, logging, firewalls/packet filters as development progresses using your corporate runbooks to find deployment errors early, gather statistics, fix incompatibilities and re-factor as necessary to make optimal use of environment... and so on until you have a system.

Permalink
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/dhushon/entry/evolutionary_software