The estimated cost of software failures is estimated to be around 50 to 80 billion dollars per year. Reports also say that 3 out of 5 IT projects do not do what they were supposed to for the expected costs. While there are several factors that could contribute to this scenario, one of the major contributors is the lack of undivided focus on application engineering quality. In many cases, development teams are tasked with building and maintaining the entire solution without proper support on architecture/design front. Following are some of the reasons why this will not work,

  • Developers have problems in getting started – Developers have the tendency to tackle problems at the code level instead of addressing it at a design level. Developers only look at the functionality to be achieved and build the solution starting with UI. They end up having the business functionality spread across all the layers – UI, DAL, Business Layer, Queries, Stored procedures, etc.
  • Developers have difficulty with the steps needed to successfully build an application – Even if a development team has been sufficiently trained in the basic technology, they’re still left a blank slate when development begins. This opens up questions like “Where do I start?” “How does all of this technology help me with what I’m building?” “How do I glue it all together to get to my end application?” Technology often leaves the developer with more options than answers.
  • Developers are always under time pressure – Developers are always under constant pressure to deliver the customer requests, and they don’t get too much time to step back and think about the right way of doing things in the form of refactoring, redesign or re-architecting. This leads to a scenario where the developers only aim to complete a given ticket/issue rather than doing a holistic thinking of the situation.
  • Many developers are solving the same technical problems again and again– You would typically see the developers solving similar issues again and again.  For example, every developer would write separate caching mechanisms, different loggers, etc.  In the absence of a standard development architecture and environment, developers would be duplicating the efforts.
  • The application is hard to maintain and extend – Applications that are not following the right architecture/design are extremely difficult to update, extend, and modify for basic bug fixes and modifications, as well as for more robust overhauls, to meet changing business requirements.

The bottom line is that the architectural issues behind developing and maintaining applications are significant. Without a proper platform in place, developers are left with undocumented procedures or a verbal design philosophy to guide their development. Therefore, Application Development Platforms (ADP) plays a strategic role in drastically improving success rates of projects and as well improve the productivity of developers.Webinar

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