More on Borland and DevCo

More Thoughts

Yesterday I attended a Borland partners meeting in Milan, Italy. It was focused on the ALM business and their recent acquisitions and future strategy. They never mentioned the IDEs.

Interesting they claim their only real competitor is IBM, seems a though call or a way to find a BIG buyer for the ALM side as well. Their strategy is interesting, but I see it relevant only for medium to large companies. Also, I'm not sure how you can give your clients the best approach to the software development process without providing any clue/detail/suggestion/appraoch/tools to help the actual "writing of the source code". Unless the only option is to have it written in India or China, their model seems unbalanced on the other side.

Notice I'm not thinking about IDEs here (using Eclipse or Visual Studio is OK for their customers). Any IDE could do, in theory. But how to they appraoch SOA and Web Services? Do they still believe in OMG and MDA architectures (apparently not if the sell ECO)? How do they work with companies with investments in SAP or similar high-end frameworks? I don't think these are just implementation details, I think they need a vision and a set of best practice for the actual development: the best business model and development process, with the best ALM tools and requirement analysis and test suite will be weak if developers use poor tools and practices. But I'm a developer, so I'm biased on this issue.

Hi all! I think borland has been leads a wrong way since 2-3 years. I think Delphi7 is the best stuff Borland's ever made. Why don't they make seperate environment for Win32 and .Net? I don't like the Delphi 2005-2006 design. Delphi7 was fast and simple and powerfull. People who want to make a simple win32 applications don't want the new design, don't want to wait for the environment for 1-2 minutes and .... I like Delphi7 because its very fast, its very simple, and suits for me. Borland (or the new company) should offer two different programming environment. One for the .Net framework, and one for the win32 apps. This is my opinion but I think I dont need the new slow desing and other redundant things to make good win32 applicatons! Regards! Tamas Pocker pocker.tamas@gmail.com

Hello Marco, This is Proto. The last time I posted something was to get your feedback about "open-sourcing" Delphi. Thanks for your detailed post on the issue. I am taking exception to your line "Unless the only option is to have it written in India or China, their model seems unbalanced on the other side". I am an Indian staying in India, and I agree that India is only a developing country. However to brandish all software originating from countries like India (or China) as sub-standard is definitely uncalled for. Just thought will point it out. Of course, I can list out the greatness of India/Indians, and our achievements as a nation in every field, achieved in spite of all the huge negatives, but I won't indulge in that exercise here. I really am not expecting this comment to be published here, but since I hold you in very high esteem for your knowledge (articles and blog) and your fantastic Delphi books, I thought the least I can do is to lodge my protest in this fashion, to let you know that you have unnecessarily offended lot of people's sentiments. Regards, Proto.

"Unless the only option is to have it written in India or China" That's exactly what they want, wish, hope or dream. I went through several situations like that, executives trying to apply the same categories from the manifacturing industry to the software industry, where "coders" are just "workers" like turners or milling machine operators. They have to be "cheap" and possibly they want to move software developoment in some unexpensive areas, wether underdeveloped European areas with large EU fundings or some inexpensive countries abroad. They still think that given the "perfect" blueprint assembling software is like assembling a refrigerator. Most of them are unable to understand that good software has much more cleverness inside that a refrigerator or TV set. And that building software is like building a prototype. The manufacturing phase is just printing CDs or deployment. But understanding it will subvert the world they believe in...

Proto, thanks for your comment and I'm really sorry if I have "unnecessarily offended lot of people's sentiments". It was not my intention at all and I'll explain why. I probably have not expressed myself clearly, as it was just a short passing sentence. First of all, I know many Delphi Indian developers (and a few Chinese ones), some of which live in India and some in the US or Europe. I know they are very competent. I know the average Indian programmer has a very high IT education. At my univesity, almost 20 years ago, I learned writing good software on a book co-authored by an Indian professor! I don't think there was anything in my post impliying the opposite, if there was I really used the wrong words. Second, I have nothing against having software developed in easter europe, far east, Italy, or elsewhere in the world. I know some successful offshoring projects as well as others that failed. I also understand the rationale of companies like ALM/Borland saying: "we need precise ways to express requirements and to test the complaince of the resulting software" more than in the past, because software is outsourced more and more often (at times locally, mostly offshore). My complain is that they seem not to care enough about the actual coding practices and process. To me this implies that if programmers are the cheap part of the equation they can waste extra time, so you don't have to make coding efficient and coders productive by using the proper libraries and architectures. Maybe good programmers will come out with great software, but I don't think offshore programmers should write cobol or RPG code when they can use MDA tools or advanced architectures. And the reason they can use them is exactly because they are very good developers. You say "to brandish all software originating from countries like India (or China) as sub-standard is definitely uncalled for" and I agree. This is exaclty how I understand the position of big consulting companies these days. It is what I was criticizing as well!

Hello Marco, Thanks so much for the reply. Great to know that you didn't had any negative connotation in mind when you wrote about India and China. I really am happy that you not only published that comment -- something you could have easily avoided -- but also provided a detailed clarification about what exactly you had in mind when you wrote that line. I agree with you that there must be "precise ways to express requirements and to test the complaince of the resulting software". But I think it is of utmost importance no matter where you do development. After all, as we know, the C3 project [http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/C3.html] got canceled in spite of Kent Beck being around, and following all the good programming practices like [rigorous] "Testing" and "On-site Customer"! Regards, Proto.

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