Additional Considerations Regarding Software Development

To gather insights for DZone's Software Development Research Guide, scheduled for release in July, 2016, we spoke to 18 executives, from 15 companies, who have created software for their companies, as well as their clients.

Here's who we talked to:

John Basso, CIO and Co-Founder, Amadeus Consulting | John Purrier, CTO, Automic | Laszlo Szalvay, Director of Sales and Partnerships, cPrime | Scott Rose, Senior Director of Product Management, and Miikka Andersson, Product Manager, CollabNet | Jeanette Cajide, VP of Corporate Development and Samer Fallouh, VP of Engineering, Dialexa | Andreas Grabner, Technology Strategist, and Brett Hofer, Global DevOps Practice Leader, Dynatrace | Anders Wallgren. CTO,Electric Cloud | Alexander Polykov, CTO, ERPScan | Baruch Sadogursky, Developer Advocate, JFrog | Rob Juncker, VP of Engineering, LANDESK | Mike Stowe, Developer Relations Manager, MuleSoft | Zeev Avidan, VP of Product Management, OpenLegacy | Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali | Sushil Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, Robin Systems | Nikhil Kaul, Product Marketing Manager, SmartBear 

We asked these executives, "What have I failed to ask you that you think we need to consider with regards to software development today?"

Here's what they had to say:

• We need to consider the credibility of the sources the developer uses. Everyone is moving to Open Source. There are credibility issues with Open Source which has also introduced the innate problem of laziness – developers don’t look into what things really do. Someone else has already read it for me. This is a bigger issue for closed resources. You lose insight into what the module gives you and what’s hidden. Open Source is open for a reason – it will help safety conscious people understand the thinking behind it.
• What happens when push comes to shove around timeliness - do most people look at reducing the feature set or pushing back the due date?
• I hear about all companies becoming software companies; however, we don't have enough qualified people to develop and manage the software we already have and people are wanting more. Open Source is disrupting commercial tools, will it ultimately replace them?
• We need to keep an eye on the skillset gap of the people we are hiring.
• We need to talk about deployment and operation in addition to development. We need to know what kind of interactions users are having with the application, how we can optimize performance and improve the UX.
• Front-end lean start-up stuff is bigger than Scrum. We need to know where do backlog items come from and the best way to address the. The traceability of ideas – where do truly innovative companies like Apple come up with their ideas?
• What’s the next disruptor in software development? Let's see where we land on containers and microservices – what will they displace? There’s still a lot of opportunity to accelerate software development and deployment.
• The industry has not planned well for success. What is the industry doing to address the scarcity of talent? Who is asking the question so we have the right people for the right jobs? What do we do to make the industry successful in 20 years?
• Understand how developers view DevOps as a “disruptor.” Developers love it when they get to the cloud. Infrastructure gets defensive because it disrupts the infrastructure world.
• Which direction are developers moving? Are they staying purely in development or broadening into testing and development? Is Agile gaining ground?
• How can we help improve the quality of apps at the beginning of development? Test-driven development, business-driven development, code collaboration, service virtue. Have someone else look at the code review. Increase value for testing, end users, create framework to write test cases. How much time is spent developing versus testing (30%/70%)?  How has this changed in the last two years? Most testing is still being done by testing engineers. It’s difficult to get started on testing versus developing. Developers need tools to make it easy and we need to ensure the tools work, are intuitive, and iterative.

Is there anything else we've missed in our series of posts regarding the state of software development today?