Netuality

Nice excerpt from an Inc. article :

Future Beef's real albatross, says Darrell Wilkes, was an expensive computer system that ran enormously complex software from J.D. Edwards. “We were pouring all this data in, but we could never get the data out,” says Wilkes, whose job, as the company's cattle and supply expert, was to monitor the progress of about 300,000 head of cattle. And these weren't just any cattle. These were Future Beef cattle, raised by ranchers who met its standards for feeding and monitoring their herds. Wilkes had to keep track of which steers had been given certain region-specific mineral supplements, which had been fed their necessary doses of vitamin E, which had been measured for yields of particular tissues and fats, and what the optimum dates were for shipping each steer off to the slaughterhouse.

When Wilkes asked his staff for the numbers, they didn't have a clue. They had not been able to retrieve the data from the computer system.

“I swore a lot, and jumped up and down a lot, but it didn't do a lot of good,” he says. “We would have been better off going in there with a very simple system. At least the simple systems give you your damn yield report.”

Click here to read the whole article.

Recently, an Indian poster on a Slashdot thread ('India Outsourcers Find Back Door in Canada') mentioned that:

Software Developers in India (including me) are paid 350 times the prevailing minimum wage in India.

I thought it would be interesting to make a comparison with the same data in Europe:

• in a country such as France, this makes 402.640EUR/month.
• in one of the countries wich has recently join EU, such as Hungary, this means almost 67.000EUR/month (Hungary does not have the biggest wages in the recent wave of new EU members).
• finally in a country such as Romania which is scheduled to join EU in 2007, 350 times the minimum wage is however close to 25.000EUR/month and rising with two figures percentage in the last couple of years, due to economic growth. Romania and Bulgaria are considered the poorest countries to join EU in the next years.

Outsourcing in India is more than just a temporary industry trend … and will touch all EU as strong as it does with US. Dear US developers, would you please let us join the club ? (we'd rather not, but you know …)

“Sir, on behalf of this Democratic Government of Nigeria, I apologize for any delay you might have encountered in receiving your money in the past.”

Ummm, well … apologies accepted.

Being extremely busy lately, I arrive a bit late at the Junit destruction feast. While it is probably true that some guys with a certain gift for writing blog articles may “come up with something far more useful in a couple of days”, I think the discussion is missing an important point: there's a whole ecosystem living around Junit. We have Ant integration, we have the choice between code coverage tools (both commercial and open-source), plugins for mainstream IDEs and a certain number of useful or less-useful extensions. We have extensive documentation and a plethora of examples to feed the small fishes. Throwing Junit down the drain means throwing all these down the drain. Or, at least: write your own Ant integration, adapt a code coverage tool and rewrite the IDE integration, rewrite documentation and examples – this is not going to be done in “a couple of days”.

Another Junit advantage is that this little simplistic API is ubicuous. I mean, every developer heard about it and knows how to use it, unless of course he/she was living under a rock for the last few years. And I don't mean every Java developer, but just about every developer for a language under the xunit umbrella. Meaning : all the programming languages (unless you consider “languages” such as Whitespace, Brainfuck and INTERCAL).

Beck and Gamma have not only written some “crappy” classes and put the few “laughable” chunks of code on Sourceforge, they have done it first. Now, there is some well-founded criticism about the lack of evolution in Junit, but one thing is undeniable : it really did fill a niche, back then in 2000. The code may not be beautiful (and this is not good coming from XPers) but it serves its purpose : to provide a simple framework for unit testing.

Competition is the key here and smart newcomers on this “market” are good news for us programmers. But, it's gonna take some time and a lot of work to build a similar ecosystem, a similar mindshare and usurp Junit's kingdom. That would be of course more interesting to see than denial of four years of Junit influence in a few well-rounded, but futile phrases.

… at least that's what Mr. David Gristwood says in this (otherwise excellent) entry ('21 Rules of Thumb – How Microsoft develops its Software') on his MSDN weblog. Davis thinks that :

Even discounting the added development burden, with the addition of each additional platform the job of QA increases substantially. While clever QA management can minimize the burden somewhat, the complexity of multi-platform support is beyond the reach of most development organizations. Place your bets. Demand multi-platform support from your system software vendor, then build your product on the absolute fewest number of platforms possible.

What kind of 'portability' are we talking about in the context of software development at Microsoft ? He is probably making allusions to software being developed simultaneously for desktop and pocket Windows, which is in fact quite a challlenge for QA and for the developer team. But if it's a tongue-in-the-cheek reference to Java WORA, I found this entry to be somewhat funny. Let's – for the sake of the argument – suppose that you develop for multiple platforms and your QA team is able to thoroughly test only one of them. Basically, this means that your product is going to work OK on the main platform and have some flaws (most probably in the GUI area) on other platforms. How is this worse than having a product which purposedly works on a single target platform ? Humm, is JVM 'system software' after all ?