Agility at the core of s/w development

BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM India, kick-started its IBM Rational software conference 2009, on Wednesday with theme of agility.

The conference key-note focused on how can being agile and open to innovation in this environment help in the software development life cycle.

“This event is all about agility. It is about gaining the ability to be agile during software development process,” said Steve Wilkins, director, marketing and strategy, Software Group, IBM Asia Pacific.

The event had an touche of green, as it also focused on how innovation in software development can enable the world to achieve green and smarter planet.

According to Hayden Lindsey, vice president and distinguished engineer in the IBM Software Group, today's computing landscape is totally changed. Computing today is going into devices and software is the key enabler to support the primary functions of these devices.

He also noted that most of the innovations across industry is based on software, be it electronics, energy, smarter transport etc. the integration of different systems in devices is through software.

“In this downturn environment analysts are looking at software delivery process as key differentiator that allows innovation. The world is opening to new types of applications and there is tremendous responsibility for the programming as well as the delivery community,” Steve Robinson, vice president of Worldwide Sales for IBM Rational.

He further mentioned that the Rational software plays a key role in IBM's smarter planet initiative.

The sessions offered the audience few insights on the business aspect of software development by focusing on how their rationale strategy helps in collaboration, time to market and cost effectiveness in software development.

One such example was citied Wilkins by about how their Rational tools provide with upfront testing, which in turn enables effectiveness as well as reduce cost.

“Usually testing is done in the end of development life cycle. But we allow up-front testing i.e as you develop you test. This solves the issues in real time rather getting an issue after the entire development. The Rational systems offering manages all those complexities related the development life-cycle,” added Wilkins.

IBM has plans to integrate most of its offerings under Rational into its newly introduced, open source platform, Jazz. Earlier, all IBM Rational tool were under the Eclipse platform.

BM Rational Quality Manager, Rational Team Concert, and Rational Requirement Composer have already been integrated.

The latest integration under this platform would be the IBM Rational Focal Point Manager.