Aug
17
Written by:
Graham Keitch
Wed, 17 Aug 2011 07:12:26 GMT
I was interested to read the results of a recent survey that looked at how IT departments have been restructuring in response to economic conditions and advances in technology. Some of this is good news for Grey Matter and many of our customers. The survey predicts that two job roles in particular have a rosy future. One of these took me a little by surprise but I'll return to that in a moment. The future looks good for project managers and that doesn't come as a surprise given that efficient (new) systems will help businesses maintain a competitive edge in difficult times. The cloud and increasingly mobile nature of the workforce will be the driving force behind many new projects. On-line services and Internet shopping will also fuel the need for future projects as businesses strive to improve the functionality and efficiency of their web sites. These need careful project management and I've been seeing a lot of interest lately in project management tools such as Oracle's Primavera. So the other 'safe' job for the future should really come as no surprise. It's the developer of course, whose skills are clearly vital for the coding required to build the projects. So, why wasn't I expecting that?
I've been anticipating for a long time that modelling and smarter tools would almost eliminate the need for coding in business applications, which would impact on the role of the developer. They have certainly reduced the amount of coding that has to be done but I must admit the widespread adoption of tools that virtually eliminate coding for business applications is taking longer than I expected. As my first involvement in IT predates the PC era, I have first-hand experience of what we used to call 4GLs, fourth generation languages that allowed one to create systems (albeit limited in capability) by giving simple English commands. You specified what needed to be done and let the 4GL do the work. It was never quite that easy and 4GLs were quite restricted in terms of capability. They were mostly designed for specific purposes such as data manipulation or reporting but these were precisely the sort of tasks that could be cumbersome and keep a COBOL programmer out of mischief for hours on end! Today's event driven systems with rich UIs are far more complex and I suppose the ability to drag and drop controls onto a form as you do in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or Embarcadero RAD Studio XE is the modern day parallel for speeding up development. Components such as those provided by Infragistics and ComponentOne also reduce the amount of coding that has to be done so to be fair, things really have motored on over the years. There are a wide variety of tools based around UML, BPML, MVC frameworks and model driven design, all aimed at speeding up or simplifying complex development projects. But the developer still has to do a lot of hand coding and probably always will.
So it looks like the developer will remain a sought after commodity into the foreseeable future. The landscape is changing though. The recently released Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is a sort of modern day reincarnation of the earlier 4GLs but with much greater sophistication. This new product handles the user interface and data manipulation via prebuilt templates and business object types. You can build data-centric SilverLight applications with minimal or zero coding. Whether it's used for prototyping or for building a complete application, this opens up the possibility for more computer savvy business users to get involved. That brings its own pros and cons of course but I'm generally in favour of getting the business units more heavily involved in IT projects. By that, I don't just mean requirements definition or user acceptance testing but actually getting involved in building at least parts of the system. 4GLs and their more sophisticated derivatives did that in the past and helped prepare IT departments and business units for the introduction of the PC and end-user computing. In some industries such as financial services, it’s not uncommon to find certain end-users sharing their time between day to day business duties and IT projects. For some, it opens the door for a career in IT. With greater capability being packed into mobile devices and the predicted high demand for good developers, user participation will increase whether we like it or not. While cloud hosted services may completely eliminate the need for some in-house applications to be built, the converse is also true. The cloud and mobile devices are just as likely to open up completely new opportunities that will require more of a developer’s time and skills. On top of that, once business users latch on to the fact that systems can be delivered with greater ease they will simply demand more! It remains to be seen whether LightSwitch marks a turning point in simplifying development or whether it opens up a can of worms! Either way, developers are likely to be burning the midnight oil for a while yet.