Forrester’s outlook for 2010: less fat, more meat

SDTimes recently published an article entitled “Five changes for application development in 2010” in which they reference a newly released Forrester report. This report attempts to delineate five changes regarding how development will be conducted in 2010 (and beyond) based upon the less than ideal economic climate we’re currently living in. In fact, the authors of the Forrester report use the term “lean and mean” to describe the focus going forward, which stresses lowering overall IT costs and staying focused on those projects that provide real business value.

Without surprise, the first aspect listed in the report is an embracing of cloud computing by IT organizations. The SDTimes article states that the cloud

will speed delivery of custom applications by enabling organizations to leverage infrastructure-as-a-service platforms, rather than having to buy, install, and configure servers, storage and networks.

Indeed, the premise of the cloud’s lowering of IT costs is reality, baby — rather having to buy and build an infrastructure up front (like we used to do), teams can essentially defer this cost until such time as a live environment is required; more over, that environment can be spun up on demand at a fraction of the cost of having to purchase hardware up front. What’s more, the cloud accounts for your costs associated with power and even personnel.

Next, the article refers to “finding your inner startup” where teams can

streamline processes, as well as the tools and platforms they use in development, and jettison those that no longer make sense to the business.

In many ways, this is related to the next aspect, which

focuses on lowering costs by moving from big, expensive Java and .NET platforms to less-expensive alternatives such as Adobe Flex, Apache Tomcat, Dojo, Google Web Toolkit, and other open-source platforms and frameworks.

As I see it, they are both related; that is, in many ways, streamlining development is all about writing less code and borrowing as much of it as possible. That is, leverage open source across the board. Practically the entire development infrastructure can be borrowed at this point: IDE? Covered by Eclipse. Database? Covered by MySQL. App Server/web server? Covered by a bevy of applications ranging from Apache to Tomcat to Geronimo.

In fact, there’s a great quote regarding a commercial company’s move to Geronimo:

When a large retailer recently chose to deploy Apache Geronimo to more than 4,000 of its retail stores, its resulting software license costs was pretty compelling: 4,000 times 0 equals 0.

What’s more, everything in between is available too — ORM? Done. Hibernate. Testing? Done. JUnit, easyb, Spock, etc (the list goes on and on). Logging? Do I really have to list this one?

Clearly, as far as streamlining processes goes, it’s all about some form of agility. This isn’t some trend or fad — agile processes work and work quite nicely. Call it lean, call it mean, the fact of the matter is that agile, when done right (read done with discipline) produces working features that a business wants fast.

Finally, the report lists a focus on the user experience as key along with developing internal talent (i.e. training and conferences).

In short, 2010 is bound to be the year of Development 2.0, baby. Or at least that’s what Forrester Research thinks!

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