Zen and the Art of Software Engineering

The Economist Technology Quarterly, published in June 2003, quotes an interesting study published in 2002 by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology that estimates the cost of software bugs to the American economy alone at over $60 billion a year. A compelling argument for those who have been shouting from the rooftops for over a decade now that programming is best done through technology and is too important to be left to human beings! And while such a pronouncement may be completely inappropriate in America–where the economy is struggling with a jobless economic revival–or in India–where placement officers in engineering and management schools are seeing the IT industry back to its mass recruiting ways–this software engineering trend is becoming a reality faster than one may imagine.

“While solution blueprinting is the unmistakable trend, there is still a need for manpower to build new systems and reengineer old ones into the new architecture” Ganesh Natarajan

Not so long ago, the accepted method of getting computer systems developed was for the user organization to send a request to the systems department, the systems manager to engage a consultant for the scooping and specification exercise and more often than not, the consultant to find a programming team to write the code. Picture now a different method of achieving a better result. The business user is empowered by modeling technologies and a trained solutions architect to analyze the present and desired business processes, identify business objects and derive business use cases for the business objects. The interaction between business objects is modeled to identify application use cases and business workflows. This is followed by some simple incorporation of system controls and definition of system boundaries and the complete application has now been modeled and is ready for generation in any desired programming language.

The basic difference that emerges between the traditional system development lifecycle and the new application modeling and software blueprinting approach is that the core activity has shifted from error-free programming to solution modeling and architecting. Not only is it possible to generate new applications in most contemporary languages, it is also feasible to build wrapper code around legacy systems and reverse engineer systems developed in an earlier generation into new solution blueprints. The obvious advantages to systems departments of user organizations are that there will hardly be any need to employ ill-trained and highly mobile programming talent. On the contrary, the power can now be restored to the hands of the business user.

If solution blueprinting is the answer to the prayers of every organization that is tired of investing large sums in computer systems development and maintenance activity, it can also be the next big threat to an already battered software industry, as its historical core competence of throwing cheap programming bodies at every customer problem becomes an anachronistic approach to building software. The good news is that while solution blueprinting is the unmistakable trend and every software exporter worth his salt is investing in tools and technologies to make this happen, there is still a need for manpower, albeit of a different capability and quality, to build new systems and reengineer old ones into the new architecture.

The challenge for the Indian software industry is to train and equip a new generation of IT professionals to become solutions architects, project managers and quality specialists needed to fuel and sustain the IT revolution. With the Indian industry still not having tapped any significant share of the new application development market worldwide, a fate worse than Jurassic Park awaits those firms who have not geared themselves for this transformation.

Ganesh

Natarajan



The author is deputy chairman & managing director of Zensar Technologies and chairman of Nasscom’s SME Forum for Western India