Independent Report by Forrester Research, Courtesy of MKS: "Selecting the Right Requirements Management Tool - Or Maybe None Whatsoever"
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(Source: MKS) Many of today's requirements management tool purchases are misguided: Application development and program management professionals often buy requirements management tools for the wrong reasons and select tools that are out of line with their needs. In this independent report, Forrester advises app dev organizations to be realistic about the problems that a requirements management tool can address, the level of tooling that they require, and their ability to build and maintain tool integrations.
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(InfoWorld) - If you curse your "tier-one" IT management solution as too cumbersome, too complex, and too expensive, you're not alone. In arecent Gartner study that declares the "Big Four" -- BMC, CA, HP, and IBM -- increasingly vulnerable to SaaS (software as a service) and open source alternatives, surveyed users gave their vendors mostly C's and D's, and a good number of incompletes. For Bill Karpovich, co-founder and CEO of Zenoss, dissatisfaction with the leading management frameworks is a business model. In fact, Karpovich notes, Zenoss' open source network and system monitoring solution was born from the failure of IBM Tivoli at USi, an application service provider (and now a subsidiary of AT&T) where he and Zenoss inventor and CTO Erik Dahl used to work. "At USi we had spent millions on IBM Tivoli, and like many people we were very unhappy that it didn't work," Karpovich recalls. "Erik was the architect that was brought in to help us figure out our management platform. Erik's recommendation was to throw out Tivoli and build our own." And so USi built its own management infrastructure, which included both commercial off-the-shelf products and open source software, bringing all of the pieces together into a framework called USi Oasis. The experience led Dahl to realize there was a big opportunity to build a next-generation network and systems management product on the open source stack. He left USi to do just that. The difference between Dahl's "next-generation" approach and the traditional tools, Karpovich says, is the focus on relationships among network devices, servers, and applications rather than on individual systems. "Model-based management has been Erik's philosophy from day one, and today that is called a CMDB basically," Karpovich says. "So that was at the core of the product from the start, building that model in an object way that is extensible and supports complex relationships." According to Karpovich, the Big Four, built back in the client/server era, simply didn't have the right data model to account for these relationships, or to provide the different views into the IT environment that enterprises need today. And their way of doing business is outdated too, he adds. "They're living off an old version of the enterprise software model that doesn't exist today, which is selling software for a million dollars and having it take a year to deploy," Karpovich says. "We're just beyond that." As Zenoss Core approaches its 2.0 release in June, the open source project boasts more than 13,000 registered downloads from SourceForge.Net. Among the additions in the new release are discovery of configuration policy violations and a plug-in framework for application monitoring packs called ZenPacks. ZenPacks for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server will be immediately available to enterprise subscribers from Zenoss, with more ZenPacks to follow from the company and the community in coming months. The enterprise edition also features a WYSIWYG environment for running synthetic transactions against Web applications, providing a way to monitor a Web site from the user's point of view. "You can correlate the end-user experience with all of the element level views," Karpovich explains. "So I can say, Wow, I broke my 8-second rule on adding an item to the shopping cart, and I wonder what was happening on my network at the time, I wonder what was happening with memory and disk? Were there any processes that were taking up too much CPU?" Zenoss' business model is based on selling professional services, support, and value-added functionality to enterprise subscribers. But Karpovich believes the company's success depends on leveraging the community to improve the product, build out the library of ZenPacks, and most of all, help Zenoss keep up with rapidly changing needs. "That's where the Big Four struggled in the past, right?" asks Karpovich, suggesting one last lesson from history. "A technology trend occurs, and a year later you get a management tool for it. It's just too slow. The world moves too quickly. "IT management is the infinite problem, so it's perfect for open source," Karpovich concludes. "One company simply can't generate enough ideas or enough R&D to stay on top of managing all of IT."
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(Source: HP)  This paper offers a structured approach to planning and implementing HP Quality Center software, an integrated, web-based suite of tools and best practices for automated software quality testing.
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An Eclipse IDE plug-in that would provide search capabilities specifically for developers is being readied by a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor.ADVERTISEMENTSBC Case Study: Crate & BarrelWhat sold them on improving their network? A system that could cut management costs from the get-go. Find out more.
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Selecting a preferred vendor to meet all of your company's storage needs is a noble idea but only works if you, as a storage manager, are willing to accept that in some circumstance you can not or will not make the best technology choice for your company's application requirements.
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Vendors of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can expect their market to become more buoyant as companies ponder purchasing new systems or boosting the functionality of existing ones, according to ...
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Krugle shipped on Tuesday an upgrade of its enterprise code search appliance for software development teams that is designed to offer improved scalability and search accuracy.Krugle is also now offering prospective customers the ability to evaluate the product on VMware before purchasing it.Krugle Enterprise 2.0 is sold as an appliance and can be configured to work with a variety of software change management systems, including ClearCase, Perforce, Microsoft&#39;s Team Foundation Server, Subversion, and others, according to Krugle. It also can crawl flat-file systems and code archives, according to the company, based in Menlo Park, California.Results can be viewed through a Web browser, but Krugle also offers support for searching directly from the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment). There is an application programming interface for creating other integrations as well. &quot;We have a first-class integration with Eclipse, and the next cab off the ramp will be [Microsoft&#39;s] Visual Studio,&quot; said Matt Graney, senior director of product management.Michael Cot&#233;, an analyst with Redmonk, said Tuesday that it is important for software like Krugle to be tightly linked with a developer&#39;s core environment.&quot;If it can&#39;t be crammed into the IDE, the experience that&#39;s in front of the software developer every hour of the day, I think it won&#39;t get the face time it needs to be worth it,&quot; Cot&#233; said. &quot;As an example, project management software that doesn&#39;t have a touch-point in IDEs tends to only be looked at by managers, and then developers have no idea about the overall project status.&quot;However, it may in fact be easier to scan code results in a browser window, according to Graney. &quot;From a real-estate point of view, Eclipse is a busy sort of environment,&quot; he said.Users can use Krugle to search code repositories in a variety of ways, such as for a specific project, or solely for the comments that developers place with code upon check-in. The engine can also recognize various code features, such as function calls and class definitions.It supports more than 40 languages, according to the company. There is also some reporting capability built into the product, such as a &quot;heat map&quot; function that provides a snapshot of activity levels among various projects.&quot;We&#39;ve been really impressed with it,&quot; said Patrick Hendry, CEO of Thuridion, a software consulting company and early beta user of the 2.0 release. &quot;It definitely saves us time. We haven&#39;t sat down and quantified how much we&#39;re saving into dollars, but clearly that&#39;s happened.&quot;Hendry&#39;s company is aligned with Visual Studio, not Eclipse. It hasn&#39;t yet built an integration with Krugle, but may down the road if it becomes a paying customer, Hendry said. &quot;We&#39;ll probably take a look at that. It&#39;s not a must-have, but it would probably be nice to have.&quot;The Scotts Valley, California, company mostly creates software for publishers who then sell it, Hendry said. Thuridion has &quot;a large body of code&quot; at any given time -- some three million to four million lines of code, excluding comment documents, he said.Thuridion &quot;very briefly&quot; considered other vendors but felt Krugle returned better results, he said.Subscription pricing typically begins at about $25,000 per year and scales up depending on the size of the code base, the number of users and how often the code base is crawled.Krugle was formed in October 2005. Its competitors include Koders and Google. The company also runs a free site, www.krugle.org, which can be used to search more than two billion lines of open-source code. The krugle.org index can also be accessed through the enterprise product.
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Found this really cool search engine (Koders ) via ResearchBuzz:   "An article at Newsforge pointed me to Koders ( http://www.koders.com ) a search engine for finding programming code. Nifty. The front page allows you to specify keywords, sixteen languages (from..."  This is pretty dead on.  I had a similar idea about 3 years ago I was calling SourceEngine which for a while was my Alexandria  project under Jakarta.  Some of this technology morphed into Gump .  Heres one innovation which I don't think Koders has picked up yet; use source includes as indegree to compute a CodeRank.  There you go... I'm giving you guys that one for free!  This is the Google innovation but applied to source code ...
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(InfoWorld) - Borland Software surveyed its own customers to get a snapshot of the ALM (application lifecycle management) market and found heterogeneity rules in application development.Â  The company polled more than 300 customers in May and June. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they support two or more development platforms, and 42 percent deploy to both Java and .Net. Half are using four or more ALM tools, and 33 percent have tools from more than three different vendors. Sixty-six percent of respondents use both open-source and commercial ALM tools. Meanwhile, 44 percent of respondents said they use two or more software development processes with agile methodologies and custom processes receiving the highest percentage of votes. "One of the reasons we're seeing folks actively move to the agile space is so they can be more responsive," said Marc Brown, Borland vice president of product marketing. But some user sites may not use agile processes if they have so many people trained on a particular process and gauge that change presents more risks than benefits, Brown said. According to the survey, the top priority in delivering software was meeting the needs of the business or customer with 59 percent selecting that priority. Some 25 percent ranked delivery of high-quality software as their top goal. Nearly 50 percent of respondents plan to implement process improvement initiatives as their biggest ALM projects for the coming year, Borland said. Integration of tools received 21 percent of the vote. The survey also found that organizations are challenged in effectively managing the end-to-end process of software delivery to achieve the full potential of ALM. Among the issues cited were disconnected processes, lack of visibility and traceability across the lifecycle, poor interoperability between tools, and lack of metrics and functional silos. Borland has re-focused the company from development tools to the ALM space with its Open ALM strategy that aims to accommodate existing software development assets in delivering software.
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Need to evaluate an unprofitable company? This metric may help.
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(InfoWorld) - Inspired by the communal wisdom generated on sites like Wikipedia.com, Klir TechnologiesÂ  launched an IT management product Monday intended for system administrators at small and medium businesses. Klir Analytics 3.0 beta allows IT users to publish and share their own favorite fixes, using a software-as-a-service (SAAS) business model. Over time, the most successful software will garner the best ratings, just as the most popular photographs get top billing at Flickr.com, said James Maiocco, Klir's chief executive officer. Klir, of Seattle, hopes to gain the most users at companies that are too small for the Fortune 2000 list, where large corporations get their IT services from long-term contracts with BMC Software, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, he said. Maiocco is betting that IT managers at small companies would rather get customized service, picking their own products with a buffet-meal approach enabled by Web 2.0 technologies. Using a distributed work model is also more efficient than centralized call centers, since 50 percent of help-desk calls relate to bugs that have already been addressed by patches and release notes, he said. Fewer than 500 people use Klir Analytics 3.0 today, but Klir began distributing a free, entry-level version in August, hoping to enlist 1,000 users and push their results into statistical relevancy. Once that happens, the company will roll out quantitative benchmarking of IT products and services, based on users' reports on applications, bandwidth, networks and servers. Dell launched a similar productÂ in June with its Platinum Plus IT services offering, a dashboard that uses maps from Google Earth to let IT managers track problems and compare their results with other companies. However, Dell's product is for companies with at least 100 servers, while Klir Analytics subscriptions start at $108 per month to manage 10 devices. AÂ closer competitorÂ may be Splunk, a San Francisco company backed by CA whose software lets system administrators search through data on applications, devices and services, then share their troubleshooting advice in a community wiki.
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InfoWorld - IT procurement managers are finding that Microsoft&#39;s Software Assurance maintenance program may not save them money as hoped, according to a survey by Forrester Research.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest PHP community poll as voted on by visitors to their site. The question for this poll asked developers what they thought, of the choices on the list, was the most common mistake that PHP developers make.   Coming in at number one by an overwhelming lead was "Not escaping entities and SQL input" (a definite problem indeed) with the next highest option, "Not using a Framework" a full twenty percent lower. The next two options were closer (descending) - "Using old PHP versions" and "No or little use of Object Orientation".   There's a new poll this week for your consideration - this time asking which stage, of the five options, should come first in the development cycle of a typical content management system. Head on over and cast your vote today!
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Stop milking same old cow Advice from Microsoft on designing useful and uncomplicated software? Now, there's a novel idea.â¦
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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(Source: MKS) As companies strive for more controlled and consistent software development processes, CMMI continues to be a leading methodology for process improvement.  This paper reviews the requirements and tools necessary for an organization to reach CMMI Level Three and argues that application lifecycle management should be central to your initiative.
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On the High Performance PHP blog today, Justin Silverton has posted a few thoughts on why he thinks "oscommerce is a nightmare".   He quotes from the oscommerce.com site about what their goal for the software is and the methods they're working at to achieve those goals. Then comes his reasons for not wanting to use their software - five of them on differing subjects:  no separation of logic and presentation difficult to integrate into an existing design security cannot have multiple sizes of image previews admin navigation issues  He offers a bit of explaination for each of these, backing up his opinion with a few facts.