 Those who said that 2007 would be an extension of 2006 were
for the most part right. Of course, they were; most progress is evolutionary,
not revolutionary! I predict 2008 will be the same. Things will get better and
we will find new things to disagree on such as what roles belong in the "New
CM." This year, the detailed predictions for 2008 will be released by the
Schizophrenic Paranoid. For those of you who want to know how that came about,
I have included a little history...
Noid: Unh huh... Right...
You want him to write on what?... You
do know that he just now has time to start working on 2007's changes?... You hate me, don't you?... Okay, I'll tell him...
Bye.
Para: Who was that?
Noid: Bob . He wants Ben to write something about 2008.
Predictions, no less.
Schiz: He's going to go ballistic when you tell him! You
know that, right?
Noid: I know. That's why I told Bob I was Para.
I'll let him take the blame.
Para: You did what! Oh,
great! Let's see...
To: Ben
From: Anonymous Coward
Subject: January CM Journal Article
The subject for
this coming month's article is Predictions for 2008. It is due in 10 days.
Para:
There, he'll never know the difference.
To: Para
(Anonymous Coward)
From: Ben
Subject: Life Span
Next time, don't
forget to strip the headers and run the email through an anonymizer. You are
dead meat. I had to give up vacation time during the holidays to get the new
tools installed and I am still running behind. ‘Tis the season to be nice to
others, so please tell me you are joking! Please!!!!
To: Ben
From: Para
Subject: RE: Life Span
Noid did it, not
me!
To: Ben
From: Noid
Subject: RE: Life Span
I did not! Blame
Bob.
To: Bob
From: Ben
Subject: January CM Journal Article
There is some
confusion at this end. Is the article really Predictions for 2008 and is it due
in 10 days?
To: Ben
From: Bob
Subject: RE: January CM Journal Article
(1) Yes.
(2) No; you only
have 8 days now.
Have a happy
holiday season,
Bob
To: Schizophrenic Paranoid
From: Ben
Subject: RE: January CM Journal Article
You guys sat on
this for two days! Schiz, stop laughing - you knew about this too and didn't
tell me. I know what, since I'm too busy y'all
write the article this month! Let me know when it's done and I'll proof it and
add an introductory paragraph before it goes to Bob. And just so I have time to
do it, y'all only have 5 days.
Enjoy...
The Schizophrenic Paranoid's Predictions
for 2008
1. Ben
is going to kill us.
Noid:
Not if we kill him first!
Para: Idiot! Then we will have to write all of the articles.
Noid:
Lesser of evils; Ben lives another day.
1. Things
will continue on pretty much as they did in 2007.
Schiz:
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
and Application Lifecycle Automation (ALA)
will continue to dominate tool vendors' thoughts. The vendors that are already
active in this area will get better as they get feedback from the user
community and new players will try to get into the game by capitalizing on what
the early adopters liked and disliked.
Noid:
There will be no new base build tools. Ant, Maven, the various flavors of make
and other specialized tools will make incremental improvements.
Para: Java will continue to dominate the language war,
but Ruby and PHP will continue to make inroads in the web arena.
2. Dashboards
will increasingly become part of IDE plug-ins, especially Eclipse.
3. Eclipse
will continue to move towards a product model where it will become increasingly
difficult to select an earlier release for download.
Phren:
This will be because Eclipse needs to control the suite of plug-ins that work
with each release.
Para: But users will want to select sets based on a
Major.Minor release, even if is an older one, and then apply maintenance
patches to the base framework as needed. Some users will want to apply
maintenance patches to the plug-ins without updating the framework and thereby
breaking other plug-ins.
Noid:
Don't forget that third-party commercial vendors are now releasing plug-ins as
well and they only work with specific releases of the base framework (and in
some cases, other plug-ins as well).
4. Bridges
will become more common as CM tool components.
Ben
(ed.): Bridges are intermediate interfaces that "live" between two or more
tools. As an example, consider that most Version Control (VC) tools interface with one or more Defect, Issue and Enhancement
Tracking (DIET) tools. A bridge
would provide a single common interface that each could use. The greatest
immediate improvement would be the decoupling of the two primary tools so that
incremental updates could be applied to either without breaking the interface.
Significant changes to the tool at either end of the connection would require
only the bridge to be updated, thus allowing tool vendors the luxury of more
time to take advantage of the "improved" companion tool.
Para: Bridges will have their own dependency problems and
will slow down the data transfers between tools, but people will like the
"middleware" approach.
Noid:
It'll never work!
5. The
definition of what constitutes Configuration Management (CM) will broaden once
again to include ALM, ALA
and possibly other roles once assigned to other groups.
Noid:
This is a bad idea. We have gone from a core technology where we could
influence processes to a mega technology that defines and enforces processes.
We need to look to our core competencies just like any other "business" or the
cost to implement CM will become prohibitive.
Schiz:
I like being in control of the process. It decreases developmental entropy,
thus increasing product stability.
Phren:
But at the cost of, I hate to use the term, agility. The more CM is in control
of the process, especially at the implementation or enforcement level, the more
CM will be blamed for product delays and cost overruns. We are already
perceived by a lot of Top Management as a cost center.
Noid:
More like a cost sinkhole.
Para: I think this is where the Agile proponents are
coming from when they say that CM is unnecessary if they follow their own
precepts. I think they want only VC and some form of customer interaction
(primitive DIET) that are integrated only if the integration is transparent (or
nearly so).
Noid:
Even the abbreviation CM is now misunderstood. Many think it means Change
Management. Maybe it should.
Ben
(ed.): I have pruned the rest of this discussion as the prediction itself is
probably sound. The discussion sounds like it should be an article in and of
itself.
6. More
CM tools will advertise themselves as being "Agile Solutions," even if they
really mean "CM Solutions for Agile Development."
Noid:
I detect "Marketing Speak." Set phasers to kill!
Para: Hey, even I think that is overkill...
Schiz:
Not a bad pun, even if you are right! Or is he
right?
Phren:
I think what they will mean is that branch, merge and element metadata will be
added to a lot of the VC tools, thus facilitating refactoring and subsequent
merges.
Para: I think you are right. Even Subversion is heading
in that direction. But I think there is more to it - things like private
branches and/or issue-based metadata that can be used for selective updates and
merges.
Noid:
Oh, you mean "Change Set Management." That has been around for years in a lot
of CM tools.
Para: Yeah, but it was often too hard to use effectively.
Or else the market in general wasn't ready for it.
7. More
"discussion" about ITIL and CM, especially whether ITIL is a subset of CM or
not.
Para: I don't understand the argument. ITIL is to IT as
CM is to Quality. Both CM and ITIL share a subset of requirements, but the
class of problems they address is different.
Noid:
See number 5 above.
Schiz:
I just think that CM'ers are proponents of reuse and detest the thought of IT
reinventing the wheel with ITIL.
Noid:
As I said, see number 5 above. Power über alles! We are the project! We control the horizontal... We control the
vertical... We...
Phren:
The tranq dart finally kicked in. He'll be Okay in a while.
8. Component-level
Dependency Management, especially of third-party components, will become more
and more of a issue as Build Management (BM) advances to the next level. ALA will play into this
as well.
Schiz:
We are already seeing this to some extent with Urbancode's AnthillPro 3 series
and OpenLogic's FOSS dependency tracking products.
Para: And we will start seeing more of it as other
vendors realize the benefits.
9. On
a more technical level, there will be a transition of CM tools to Virtualized
Servers for both performance and reliability reasons.
Para: This will be a problem for those tools that do not
play well with non-local drives.
Phren:
It will also present some licensing issues for those tools tied to a CPU,
platform, drive installation, etc. or those that have a processor limit
attached.
Noid:
Oh, my head! What happened?
Schiz:
Never mind your head, what do you think of CM Virtualization?
Noid:
Finally, the tools will mirror their masters! Able to split into multiple parts
across multiple platforms that may not even exist in reality, but give a
consistent appearance to the applications! We...
Phren:
This is the first time this year I've had to use two tranq darts on him.
10. Noid
will plot his revenge against Phren.
Para: Schiz, that's not a prediction; that's a given.
Ben Weatherall is currently based in Fort Worth,
Texas where he practices Practical CM on a daily basis using a
combination of CVS and custom tools to support a modified Agile-SCRUM
development methodology. He is a member of IEEE, ASEE (Association of
Software Engineering Excellence – The SEI’s Dallas based SPIN
Affiliate), NTLUG (North Texas Linux Users Group), and PLUG (Phoenix
Linux Users Group).
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