Computer specialists had to know their hardware better
than they knew their end-users in the old days, but today it is the
other way around.
Programmers still beaver away at code, but industry observers
see business analysts replacing systems analysts, and service
oriented architecture (SOA) promising a future in which system
components are mixed and matched to meet business needs.
The prospect of such a future has emerged thanks to an evolution
of software, hardware and telecommunications that was unimaginable
40 years ago.
"We used to base our system delivery dates on two compilation
turnarounds a week, and the machine time cost £1 a minute," says
Stephanie Shirley, who in the 1960s was establishing the software
company that became today's Xansa IT services group. "That
certainly concentrated the mind on getting it bug-free first time.
These days you can do compilations any time, and so quickly.
"Knowing the hardware was certainly important. When I started
programming, different sorts of memory were still being tried out.
These days you do not have to understand how the hardware works at
all."
Others agree, remembering having to write their own basic
software such as read, write and seek routines before they could
add new-fangled 2Mbyte disc drives to their computers.
By the late 1960s, high-level languages, notably Cobol, were
making their mark. Enthusiastic programmers dived in and produced
"terrible birds' nests of programs", according to Shirley. This
brought a move towards modular programming to split systems into
manageable, understandable chunks.
But using the hardware as efficiently as possible was still the
overriding concern of programmers. Even by the mid-1970s, discs
cost £55 per megabyte, many companies measured their central
mainframe memory in kilobytes, and 2,400 bits a second was
considered fast data communication.
Huge advances in these and other areas - notably processor
microtechnology and systems software - have removed the need for
developers to be concerned about hardware, and have helped bring
software development to the edge of a new era.
Yet this future could be based on the systems of the past for
some time: 90% of application development spending is on
maintaining existing systems, according to consultancy
Northdoor.
Legacy software provider Micro Focus, which continues to make a
good living from Cobol, points to studies showing that in 70% of
organisations the main systems are originally written in that
language.
"Many organisations accept there is no need to move away from
systems that are doing a perfectly good job, just because they are
20 or 30 years old," says Butler Group research director Tim
Jennings. "It is better to let them continue, and use new
technologies to integrate them into new applications.
"Only a relatively small percentage of development now is new
code. A lot of effort is going into integration, whether it is
integrating a new application into existing systems or integrating
existing systems with each other.
"The forward direction lies here: a business process-driven
approach to new applications, with integration using SOA principles
to combine new and legacy systems to support that business
process.
"Traditional software development will still exist, but it will
become more specialised and the number of people doing it will
become smaller.
"Business analysts will sit with a user department to get to
grips with a process, produce a process model that the department
director can understand, and then work with the developers to
specify which components can be provided by existing systems, what
changes might be needed to those systems, and what new software
needs to be developed or bought in."
According to Jennings, "The holy grail will be for the IT
department to be able to say, 'We have already got systems that can
support these 20 functions in this new process we can develop these
three functions and buy in these four.'
"Packages now dominate new development and we will see the likes
of SAP and Oracle decomposing their integrated suites into service
components, with companies combining these with in-house
development.
"Open source will gain further ground and will coexist with
traditional licensing, enabling users to innovate around suppliers'
products. So open source and traditional licensing will offer
different benefits that suit different usage scenarios."
This could mean a return to the days before big integrated
packages, says Mike Small, director of security strategy at
software supplier CA.
"People used to go for the best of breed for different
applications but they often did not interoperate. So SAP and others
said, 'Come to us - we might not be best in every area, but it is
all integrated.' In future people can go back to picking
best-of-breed components and they will interoperate."
This SOA vision is shared by Alex Drobik, a European
vice-president at Gartner, who sees big benefits for business and
IT departments.
"The shift from hard-coded monolithic applications and
all-embracing packages towards the SOA vision of software
components combined and then combined again, means processes and
their IT can be built around people, not the other way around," he
says.
"There is also an opportunity to build and rebuild business
processes quite quickly as circumstances change, without having to
reinvent the wheel. Big package suppliers and others are getting
into this - SAP, Oracle, IBM.
"All this means there is an excitement in the industry that we
have not seen since the Y2K project and the early days of
e-commerce."
This time around, however, there is less urgency and more
caution, says Drobik. This is because those old systems are still
working well, cost is an issue, skills need to be developed, and
users need to be prepared too.
"Very few organisations have moved to a full SOA component-based
software architecture that they can reconfigure at will," says
Drobik.
"But it has only emerged in the past three or four years and
there is no great rush. And if everyone did it tomorrow, there
would not be enough skills in users or suppliers. That is why big
suppliers are not forcing it along. In maybe 20 years' time
everyone will be doing it, but in the next five to 10 years people
will be at different stages.
"Now is the time for CIOs to look at the issues. What is the
business need? Do we need to change our processes? What performance
improvement will we get? What skills do we need? Can we get these
components from package suppliers?
"There is also a user skills issue. If we give the marketing
team advanced data mining, can they use it? If you ask companies to
identify their top 10 business processes and how these might change
in the next two or three years, most will have difficulty
answering."
Another view of the SOA approach is that it will raise project
success rates. "Software development is no longer considered a
black art," says David Roberts, chief executive of IT directors'
group The Corporate IT Forum.
"Its increasingly important role is bringing growing
responsibility to deliver to professional, measurable standards.
Being fit for purpose will replace speed to market as a
prerequisite, and leaps of faith will be replaced by small, sure
steps to change."
Others agree. "Engineering principles and good practice in
software development that evolved in the 1970s were thrown to the
wind with Unix and Windows," says Small.
"Microsoft made a good job of producing a standard system that
people could use, but the focus was on function, not reliability,
and they have had to fix that later.
"Unix was developed as an engineering workstation system, not as
a multi-user financial transaction system. Some of its early
shortcomings did not matter when it was a just desktop workstation,
but they have had to be fixed in retrospect."
Professional standards are coming to the fore, and this may
result in the licensing of individuals or companies. The British
Computer Society has seen its membership grow by nearly 40% in just
over two years. It puts this down partly to its new membership
structure, but also to growing demand for better qualified
specialists in the wake of high profile project failures.
The BCS is leading a professionalism in IT initiative involving
other IT bodies, including E-skills UK and Intellect. Any licensing
or regulation is likely to be led by the industry or specialist
groups within it.
"Legislation takes a long time, and the IT industry changes
quickly," says BCS president Charles Hughes. "The support for the
professionalism initiative suggests that the industry should be
sufficiently enthused to put in place what is necessary for
self-regulation.
"This is already happening. For example, a register of health
informaticians is being produced through the new UK Council of
Health Informatics Professionals. This demonstrates what can be
achieved by like-minded people working together to put in place a
mechanism driven by the profession and its users."
Whatever the past progress and future of software development,
some things never change. "Software development has been totally
transformed over 40 years, but a few things have not changed at
all," says Andrew White, a principal consultant at Deloitte.
"Success is still critically dependent on stable and clearly
expressed requirements that are understandable and endorsed by the
senior user. Bad software engineering discipline leads to more bugs
and higher costs. And testing always pays off."