One of the business benefits organizations strive to achieve by implementing
a service-oriented architecture (SOA) or in utilizing Web services is the
opportunity to reuse business components. Asset reuse is one of the core
drivers of the SOA or Web service ROI calculation. Although leveraging the
service concept provides an avenue for application consolidation and reuse,
these same efficiencies also introduce a distinct level of business risk.
For example, in an architecture where multiple distributed applications
provide a business with a specific operation, should a single application
fail, the impact of the application downtime is isolated only to a limited
set of users. Conversely, the practices of application consolidation and
service reuse concentrate operations into fewer applications or perhaps a
single point of failure. As seen in the Figure 1, the impact o... (more)
Parasoft, a leading provider of Automated Error Prevention (AEP) software
solutions, recently had the opportunity to work closely with leading game
development organizations. Since game development differs from "standard"
development, we worked with game development organizations to develop
technical and process improvement strategies to suit the industry's unique
development needs. This article explores the challenges of developing
software for the game development industry, and describes the strategies used
to overcome them. The challenges and strategies discussed apply not onl... (more)
Service-oriented architectures are much different than our traditional siloed
applications. SOAs span multiple tiers and multiple applications, their
development lifecycles are multi-staged and highly iterative, and there are
multiple parties impacted by both internal and perhaps external changes to
the organization.
Delivering a secure, reliable, compliant SOA, given these complexities,
requires a different approach to quality. In a complex system, quality
measures must permeate every aspect to translate into a quality deliverable.
Architecture & Interface Consistency
For exampl... (more)
Traditional hardware and OS virtualization technology reduce software
development/testing infrastructure costs and increase access to constrained
systems. Yet, it's not always feasible to leverage hardware or OS
virtualization for many large systems such as mainframes and ERPs. More
pointedly, configuring and maintaining the environment and data needed to
support development and test efforts still requires considerable time and
resources. As a result, keeping a complex staged environment in synch with
today's constantly-evolving Agile projects is a time-consuming, never-ending
... (more)
No matter what industry you're in, software is increasingly becoming the
interface to your business. Organizations that are able to increase the speed
and quality of innovative software releases will capitalize on differentiable
competitive advantages; those that cannot will languish behind competitors.
Not surprisingly, many enterprises have begun flirting with the idea of
accelerating the SDLC to drive innovation through software. However, it's
critical to realize that there's an optimal balance between speed and quality
with software delivery-as with all engineered products. We... (more)
Wayne Ariola is Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at Parasoft, a leading provider of integrated software development management, quality lifecycle management, and dev/test environment management solutions. He leverages customer input and fosters partnerships with industry leaders to ensure that Parasoft solutions continuously evolve to support the ever-changing complexities of real-world business processes and systems. Ariola has more than 15 years of strategic consulting experience within the technology and software development industries. He holds a BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an MBA from Indiana University.
Lisa Juley
Rob Sarah
Pramod Pawar
Zakia Bouachraoui
Terry Ray
Charles Araujo
Brendan Harding
