Pulse provides novel training and tools configuration resource to aid in developer education, preparedness

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Java training and education has never been easy. Not only is the language and its third-party and community offerings constantly moving targets, each developer has his or her own preferences, plug-ins inventory and habits. What's more, the "book knowledge" gained in many course settings can vary wildly from what happens in the "real world" of communities and teams.

MyEclipse maker Genuitec developed Pulse last year to monitor and update the most popular Eclipse plug-ins, but Pulse also has a powerful role in making Java training and tools preferences configuration management more streamlined, automated and extensible. Unlike commercial software, in the open source, community-driven environments like Eclipse, there is no central vendor to manage plug-ins and updates. For the Eclipse community Pulse does that, monitoring for updates while managing individual developers' configuration data -- and at the same time gathering meta data about how to better serve Eclipse and Java developers.

I recently moderated a sponsored podcast to explore how Pulse, and best practices around it use, helps organize and automate tools configuration profiles for better ongoing Java training and education. I spoke with Michael Cote, an analyst with RedMonk; Ken Kousen, an independent technical trainer, president of Kousen IT, Inc., and adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Todd Williams, vice president of technology at Genuitec.

Here are some excerpts:

The gap between what's taught in academia and what's taught in the real world is very large, actually. ... Academia will talk about abstractions of data structures, algorithms, and different techniques for doing things. Then, when people get into the real world, they have no idea what Spring, Hibernate, or any of the other issues really are.

It's also interesting that a lot of developments in this field tend to flow from the working professionals toward academia, rather than the other way around, which is what you would find in engineering.

Part of what I see as being difficult, especially in the Java and Enterprise Java market, is the huge number of technologies that are being employed at different levels. Each company picks its own type of stack. ... Finding employees that fit with what you are trying to do today, with an eye toward being able to mature them into where you are going tomorrow, is probably going to always be the concern.

You look at the employment patterns that most developers find themselves in, and they are not really working at some place three, five, 10, even 20 years. It's not realistic. So, specializing in some technology that essentially binds you to a job isn't really an effective way to make sure you can pay your bills for the rest of your life.

You have to be able to pick up quickly any given technology or any stack, whether it’s new or old. Every company has their own stack that they are developing. You also have to remember that there is plenty of old existing software out there that no one really talks about anymore. People need to maintain and take care of it.

So, whether you are learning a new technology or an old technology, the role of the developer now, much more so in the past, is to be more of a generalist who can quickly learn anything without support from their employer.

Obviously, in open source, whether it’s something like the Eclipse Foundation, Apache, or what have you, they make a very explicit effort to communicate what they are doing through either bug reports, mail lists, and discussion groups. So, it's an easy way to get involved as just a monitor of what's going on. I think you could learn quite a bit from just seeing how the interactions play out.

That's not exactly the same type of environment they would see inside closed-wall corporate development, simply because the goals are different. Less emphasis is put on external communications and more emphasis is put on getting quality software out the door extremely quickly. But, there are a lot of very good techniques and communication patterns to be learned in the open-source communities.

[With Pulse] we built a general-purpose software provisioning system that right now we are targeting at the Eclipse market, specifically Eclipse developers. For our initial release last November, we focused on providing a simple, intuitive way that you could install, update, and share custom configurations with Eclipse-based tools.

In Pulse 2, which is our current release, we have extended those capabilities to address what we like to call team-synchronization problems. That includes not only customized tool stacks, but also things like workspace project configurations and common preference settings. Now you can have a team that stays effectively in lock step with both their tools and their workspaces and preferences.

With Pulse, we put these very popular, well-researched plug-ins into a catalog, so that you can configure these types of tool stacks with drag-and-drop. So, it's very easy to try new things. We also bring in some of the social aspects; pulling in the rankings and descriptions from other sources like Eclipse Plug-in Central and those types of things.

So, within Pulse, you have a very easy way to start out with some base technology stacks for certain kinds of development and you can easily augment them over time and then share them with others.

The Pulse website is www.poweredbypulse.com. There is a little 5 MB installer that you download and start running. If anyone is out in academia, and they want to use Pulse in a setting for a course, please fill out the contact page on the Website. Let us know, and we will be glad to help you with that. We really want to see usage in academia grow. We think it’s very useful. It's a free service, so please let us know, and we will be glad to help.

I did try it in a classroom, and it's rather interesting, because one of the students that I had recently this year was coming from the Microsoft environment. I get a very common experience with Microsoft people, in that they are always overwhelmed by the fact, as Todd said, there are so many choices for everything. For Microsoft, there is always exactly one choice, and that choice costs $400.

I tried to tell them that here we have many, many choices, and the correct choice, or the most popular choice changes all the time. It can be very time consuming and overwhelming for them to try to decide which ones to use in which circumstances.

So, I set up a couple of configurations that I was able to share with the students. Once they were able to register and download them, they were able to get everything in a self-contained environment. We found that pretty helpful. ...

It was pretty straightforward for everybody to use. ... whenever you get students downloading configurations, they have this inevitable urge to start experimenting, trying to add in plug-ins, and replacing things. I did have one case where the configuration got pretty corrupted, not due to anything that they did in Pulse, but because of plug-ins they added externally. We just basically scrapped that one and started over and it came out very nicely. So, that was very helpful in that case.

We have a very large product plan for Pulse. We've only had it out since November, but you're right. We do have a lot of profile information, so if we chose to mine that data, we could find some correlations between the tools that people use, like some of the buying websites do.

People who buy this product also like this one, and we could make ad hoc recommendations, for example. It seems like most people that use Subversion also use Ruby or something, and you just point them to new things in the catalog. It's kind of a low-level way to add some value. So there are certainly some things under consideration.

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Morph Labs and FiveRuns combine efforts to support, test and monitor Rails apps

Ruby on Rails in the cloud got another leg up this week with the announcement that Morph Labs and FiveRuns have joined forces to provide a managed hosting platform for application testing and monitoring.

Morph Labs of Portland, Oregon, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, and FiveRuns, an Austin, Texas company that provides Ruby on Rails monitoring and analysis, will use Morph Labs' AppSpace to allow developers to get insight into application performance. The goal is to make enterprise-class application developers and deployers an offer they can't refuse.

Developers can subscribe to Morph AppSpace for free and select the version that automatically integrates FiveRuns TuneUp. The apps can be deployed without any special modifications or hassles.

The Morph AppSpace automated deployment system activates FiveRuns TuneUp giving developers insight into potential bottlenecks and performance issues early on. By running the application in an enterprise-caliber environment, developers gain a clear picture of how the application will perform in real production.

Users may also choose to participate in a secure group or open community where they can share their performance information such as tips, tricks and advice from and for other Ruby and Rails enthusiasts. The companies are providing this ramp-up to FiveRuns TuneUp, along with a developer subscription to the Morph AppSpace, to encourage developers to better test and analyze their applications.

In the second phase of the partnership, Morph Labs will integrate FiveRuns Manage as a production option for each Morph AppSpace. By adding FiveRuns Manage, developers will be able to continually monitor each application running within a Morph AppSpace subscription.

FiveRuns Manage also provides additional information to enable developers to quickly diagnose problems and proactively maintain application performance.

The integrated Morph AppSpace and FiveRuns Manage solution is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2008.

This certainly ups the ante for other cloud providers that target the Ruby and Rails communities, and makes the fast-track development and deployment environment all the more appealing to enterprises.

Survey says: Aligning IT operations with business goals increases agility, cuts costs

Aligning IT with business goals -- and the benefits that brings to a business -- have long been a recurrent theme of the podcasts and discussions we've done over the last few years. So it's gratifying to see a worldwide study showing that businesses are not only pursuing this strategy, but are reaping significant benefits from it.

A survey of nearly 1,000 IT professionals, from the C-level down to frontline workers, indicates that 27 percent of companies responding are in the process of a business transformation, with another 27 percent having just completed one, and another 30 percent considering changing their processes.

Conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, London, and sponsored by Cisco Systems, the survey also revealed that improving IT responsiveness to new business requirements was the top IT objective for 57 percent of the companies. Of the companies that have completed a transformation, 43 percent said that cost savings were the top benefit they realized. Another 40 percent reported smoother, more flexible operations.

While other companies reported different effects, the most astonishing result was that only 2 percent of companies reported no tangible benefit. This would seem to indicate that transforming your business model has a 98 percent probability of success, which is pretty impressive.

One interesting result in the survey was the revelation that companies in India lead the pack when it comes to aligning the operations with business goals:

For example, respondents in India are by far the most likely to have goals associated with interacting with business counterparts. Those goals include implementing new projects based on corporate—not information technology (IT)—objectives, actively seeking opportunities to propose technology-based approaches to improving business practices and gaining more support from senior business managers for things like budgeting, change management and technology adoption.

The willingness among Indian IT groups to “go where the business is going” and take concrete steps to pursue highly collaborative working environments is perhaps one explanation for why Indian respondents were most likely to identify their companies’ organizational structures as “very effective."

The report attributes this to the fact that technology executives in India seem to have greater power in the organization. A higher percentage of Indian chief information officers (CIOs) report directly to the CEO than is typically the case in the U.S., Europe, or the Middle East.

One drawback in many companies is a lack of clear communication of business and IT goals. The survey showed that 49 percent of CIOs saw contributing to business goals as one of their top objectives, but this view was shared by only 30 percent of frontline workers. At the same time, 59 percent of IT architects saw cost cutting as an objective, while only 45 percent of CIOs thought the same thing.

The entire survey report, which isn't very long, is well worth a read for anyone involved in IT, or the business of IT. It is available for download (PDF file) from the EIU site. There is also a Webcast that explains some of the finer points.

Here are the key conclusions and recommendations from the report.

Addressing corporate cultural issues is key to any successful IT transformation project. Senior IT executives must work doggedly to communicate goals, and build bridges up and down the chain of command throughout the organization, both in business strategy sessions and regular meetings with technology employees.

IT transformation is not a cure-all. Changing processes and organizational structures may make IT departments more agile, but will do little good if IT professionals do not adapt their thinking around how better to align their efforts with that of the business on a regular basis.

Walk before you run. Before embarking on a large-scale IT transformation initiative, assess the length of time it will take to complete the effort, as well as the costs, risks and eventual benefit to the business.

Track—and publicize—success. Make sure to assess the return on investment of any IT transformation project. Not only will it strengthen IT’s reputation among business partners, it could help to build momentum for future IT initiatives.

Can't argue with all of that. Of course, it is all clearly easier said than done.

Borland's own ‘journey' to Agile forms foundation for new software delivery management solutions

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Borland Software has been in the developer productivity field for decades, but when it came time to build out a new software delivery management suite for application lifecycle management, Agile Development methods became both the means and the ends.

Over the past few years, the development process at Borland shifted dramatically to Agile and Scrum practices, which in turn deeply influenced how the new products were crafted and refined. These shifts fundamentally impacted a set of recent new products. [See product and solution rundowns. See demo and see launch video.]

To learn more about Agile Development and how Borland used the methods to build their own software management products and solutions, I recently spoke with Peter Morowski, the senior vice president of research and development at Borland. He described the journey, the productivity and business outcomes benefits, and the potential pitfalls and errors to avoid. He also wrote a great article on the experience.

As part of the podcast, I asked Peter what surprised him most about this Agile journey at Borland. "The thing that surprised me," he said, "is how powerful it is each morning when everybody gets around the table and actually goes through what they've done, basically saying, "Have I lived up to my commitments? What I am committing to the team today? And then is there anything blocking?"

"Generally speaking," said Morowski, "a lot of developers tend to be quiet and not the most social. What this did is that it just didn't allow the few people who were social to have input on what was going on. This daily stand-up had people, everybody on the team, contributing, and it really changed the relationships in the team. It was just a very, very powerful thing."

Here are some excerpts from the discussion:

Look at the late delivery cycles that traditional waterfall methodologies have brought upon us. Products have been delivered and end up on the shelf. The principles behind Agile right now allow teams to deliver on a much more frequent cycle and also to deliver more focused releases.

What I have observed over my career was the fact that there really existed two worlds. There is what I call the "management plane," and this is a plane of milestones, of phase transitions and a very orderly process and progress through the software development lifecycle.

Underneath it though, in reality, is a world of chaos. It's a world of rework, a world of discovery, in which the engineers, testers and frontline managers live.

What [Agile] is really about is that teams begin to take ownership for delivering the product. What happens is that, by allowing these teams to become self-directed, they own the schedule for delivery.

Hiring is important, regardless of what methodology you use, and I tend to stress that. I do contend there are different kinds of personalities and skill sets you are going to be looking for when you are building Agile teams, and it's important to highlight those.

It's very important that whoever comes onboard in Agile team is collaborative in nature. In traditional software environments, there are two roles that traditionally you may struggle with, and you have to look at them closely. One is the manager. If a manager is a micromanager-type, that's not going to work in an Agile environment.

What happens is that you see some things like traditional breakdowns of roles, where they are looking at what work needs to be finished in a sprint, versus "Well, I am a developer. I don't do testing," or "I am a doc writer, and I can't contribute on requirements," and those types of things. It really builds a team, which makes it a much more efficient use of resources and processes, and you end up with better results than you do in a traditional methodology.

When Borland first started developing in Agile, we had multiple locations, and each site was, in essence, developing its own culture around Agile. What I found was that we were getting into discussions about whose Agile was more pure and things like that, and so I decided to develop a Borland Agile culture.

As we've grown, and our projects are getting more complex, the fact that we evolve from site-to-site based on the same process and the same terminology has allowed us to now choose more complex Agile techniques like Scrum of Scrums or work across organizations, and have a common vocabulary, and that kind of common way of working.

One thing we clearly did was, once that we saw the benefits of doing this, we had a lot of executive sponsorship around this. I made it one of the goals for the year to expand our use of Agile within the organization, so that teams knew it was safe to go ahead and begin to look at it. In addition, because we had a reference implementation of it, it also gave teams a starting point to begin their experimentation. We also paid for our teams to undergo training and those types of things. We created an environment that encouraged transformation.

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Discussion features insights into using RESTful services plus a cool iPhone app

For a quick update on creating RESTful services, check out IONA Technologies' webinar moderated by yours truly. The recent webinar was part of IONA's "Open Source in the Enterprise" series, and is archived on their Website. (Note: free registration required.)

Included in the discussion is my introduction on how to increase value payback, followed by a presentation from Adrian Trenaman, distinguished IONA consultant, on creating RESTful services using FUSE.

Finally, Roland Tritsch, IONA director of services in EMEA, demos a really cool method for accessing RESTful FUSE services from the iPhone. [Disclosure: IONA is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

IONA has been making the news recently, especially the announcement just a few weeks ago that it was being acquired by Progress Software. A few weeks earlier, IONA released a set of enhancements to Artix Data Services designed to reduce risk exposure and operational costs.

Just over a year ago, I produced a podcast with Dan Kulp, principal engineer at IONA, and Debbie Moynihan, director of open source programs at IONA, in which we discussed the incubation Apache CXF project.