Three Wishes on Every Development Team's List

Computerworld - Software development is, without a doubt, one of the most complex areas of modern business practice, and manufacturing the tools that support successful software development requires a deep understanding of development teams' needs and wishes. As manager of desktop products at IBM's Rational Software unit, I spend much of my time talking to developers, gathering information about their needs and learning about the ways they help their businesses operate and compete effectively.
Here are the top three things software development teams are wishing for:
Wish No. 1: A better way to manage technology changes in an increasingly complex development environment.
In the face of growing technical complexity, product proliferation and constant demands for application updates, software teams are searching for ways to simplify their work. Many are hoping that the big players in the software world will commit to driving standards that create a common way for developing software. To remain successful for the long term, businesses need to integrate the software and systems they have today with those they'll build in the future. Without standard ways of doing so, this task is almost impossible.
Many of the world's largest software organizations, along with major industry consumers, are working together to define standards that will simplify software development. This includes standards efforts within organizations like the Object Management Group for Unified Modeling Language and Model Driven Architectures and W3C for XML, Web services and more. It also includes the Eclipse initiative for standard tools. In addition, many organizations are developing systems designed to access Web services through standardized technologies. This will help to make their systems interoperable with others that access those same Web services -- even if they're built with different technologies.
Open standards will also give companies a baseline for agreement -- and disagreement -- on how products should be built to interoperate and function efficiently. And given software engineers' propensity to extend standards, both for technical reasons and for the good of the market, open standards are creating real opportunities to introduce greater flexibility and sharing among software development organizations. These software companies are creating simple, accessible system models that will enable development teams to more readily understand a system's architecture and automatically generate the code required for systems integration.
Wish No. 2: Reusable assets that reduce the "reinvention of the wheel" syndrome.
The concept of reuse -- which provides architects and developers with a head start because they don't have to create everything from scratch -- has been around for quite a long time. However, although