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SD Times
July 2022
www.sdtimes.com
Modern app dev is about more than tools, platforms and languages T
oday’s application development is a complex landscape of services, integrations and architectures. In fact, most developers today spend more time writing API calls and finding open-source projects — and maintaining those applications once they’re created — than they do writing code for innovative new features. It looks nothing like “your father’s app dev,” which involved a code editor, compiler, and few other tools. In today’s world, we see developers struggling under the weight of an ever-expanding toolbox now required to bring products to life. According to Andrew Manby, AVP of Product Management, HCL Volt MX, among the drivers behind modern development are the needs of businesses to satisfy customers, and overcoming the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to be able to continue to deliver fixes and new features at speed. “We did a survey late last year with Forrester, and in our survey, 78% of respondents said they’re prioritizing improving the ability to innovate and really reach their customers,” Manby said. And for businesses to survive the pandemic, businesses had to rely on that old Yankee spirit and ingenuity, he said. “I think businesses could make do or innovate. Almost like having their own Apollo 13 moment, to fix the problem, to be able to continue to reach the customer, adding buy online, pick up in store, things like that. I was that sort of duct tape and air filter moment, for a lot of organizations.” Piecing together tools for collaboration, development and deployment to a remote workforce has been made a lot
BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN easier with cloud computing — no more creating VPNs, unless organizations have specific regulations or security needs they must follow. However, the cloud doesn’t really help address issues such as culture change and the move towards delivering products instead of projects.
Agile and culture change Agile development is one of those areas where scaling up has been a thorny issue for many organizations. Agile, according to Forrester vice president and analyst Diego Lo Giudice, is not “just a bunch of practices.” Some think going to Scrum training and bringing what you know back to the organization will have everyone working in an Agile way. But Lo Giudice said shifts to Agile and other methodologies requires a cultural and behavioral change. “Think about your IT that has been owning the projects, and now suddenly they say we’re going to move to products and you’re going to have a product owner from the business side. And he or she is going to tell you what are the most important things you need to implement. It’s kind of losing power for project managers that used to
manage these … projects.” Another issue Lo Giudice pointed out is integrating all of it throughout the organization. “Everybody thinks SAFe is saving the world. I get lots of clients who tell me, ‘we’re replacing the old bureaucracy with a new type of bureaucracy here. Cultural and behavioral change is really tough for organizations.” Further, he said, these product owners from the business don’t have the skills to think in terms of how project managers in modern development think about minimum viable features and minimum viable products. “They still think in terms of big releases,” he said. Also, he added, business-side product owners “are not even committed to Agile. It’s like, ‘We want to do Agile, but you do it, I’m not going to get involved.’ But that’s not the way agile works.” But because of this drive to modern application development, organizations are starting to think seriously about what agility, responsiveness and velocity reality mean to them. “It comes down to the business problem,” HCL’s Manby said. “I think CIOs are still faced with the same thing — at the end of the day, they still need to modernize their application inventory, they need to move to the cloud because they want to obfuscate some of the risks that they have in their data center. And they want to move that off to other vendors, they want to make the portfolio of applications more modern.” Another aspect of modern development to think about has nothing to do with tools or programming languages. It’s the difficulty organizations are havcontinued on page 15 >
