Forbes recently published Rethinking Software, an article by Ed Sperling that explores why writing and fixing applications remains a persistent pain point for most companies.
The article interviews Adam Kolawa, CEO of Parasoft, leading provider of automated solutions and infrastructure services that improve software quality and the development process. It begins:
One of the biggest problems at any corporation is software--writing new applications, fixing old ones and modifying all of it to run on new hardware or interface with new technology.
It can take months to get a new application written, and in many cases no one wants to even touch the old software for fear of breaking it. So what's the solution? Forbes caught up with Adam Kolawa, CEO of Parasoft, to talk about what's broken and how to fix it.
Forbes: Why is it so hard to get new applications written at companies?
Adam Kolawa: The main problem is productivity. Anytime people want to change anything in software they're afraid of it. IT departments are not responding fast enough to the changing environment, and they are not supporting decisions of the CIO.
Are you talking about enterprise or productivity applications?
It's both. We need to reconfigure all software. Software is everywhere now. It's in cars, consumer electronics and IT systems. The problem is that we haven't figured out how to industrialize the methods of writing it. If a custom application for IT has about 1 million lines of code, they have about 50 to 80 people working on it. That's pretty standard in the industry. You get about 10,000 to 20,000 lines of code per developer. That's the horizon of productivity and understanding.
So how do you increase that?
Productivity depends on better understanding the code you work with. No one writes software from scratch. It's like remodeling a house instead of building it from scratch. You don't have the same kind of opportunities to change things when you're remodeling as you do when you're building it the first time. You write a little bit of software, which connects with another piece you have.
Do we need more code then?
No, and that's a secondary issue. We should have people who understand better the code they work with. Over the last 20 years the number of lines of code has stayed relatively constant. We thought we would have better programming languages and better descriptions, but we didn't get very far with this. Where we did make progress is with Web services and [application programming interfaces]. The problem is that too many developers are still trying to write software from scratch instead of creating modules and re-using them.
Wasn't that the whole idea behind object-oriented programming in the 1990s?
Yes, and it failed. But Web services actually are working now. So we are progressing in our understanding of how to construct software. All of this is related to standards. If you don't have standardization you don't have progress. The moment we had standard buses and interfaces on chips, we started to make progress. In software over the past four or five years we have developed standards for software and Web services. If you go back in the history of computers they couldn't talk to each other. TCP-IP allowed them to talk to each other, but the computers couldn't understand the message. With XML we have the ability to exchange messages between computers, and now the computers do understand each other.
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Continue reading the complete article at forbes.com or parasoft.com.
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