Trend Lines
It seems we’re in a trend shift that’s deeper than has been experienced in the last several years. I don’t have any empirical evidence for this, but it’s the general direction people seem to be taking when I talk to them. Perhaps it’s a “something different” syndrome and most of these new technologies will never gain any mainstream traction. For my purposes, I’m dissatisfied with my current stack and actively looking to make some changes. Is anyone else feeling the need for a context switch to something different? What other products are likely to get dumped and become just a found memory?
I’ve been playing around with groovy/grails and really like the way you can fall back to standard java if needed. Looking at your list I feel ancient, but I’ve started exploring HTML5. Of all the things on the list I think Object-Oriented to the hybrid is most likely to happen because in my experience very few developers really understand OOP and they been writing bloated inefficient code that hopefully a hybrid solution may reign in. Speaking of trends what about process wise? I’ve been forced to look at Lean Software Development and it seems just another use for SCRUM and Agile techniques. Where do you think the methodology trends are going to take us?
[Reply]
Reply from Chad:
I’m not sure where the methodology trends are going, but I know what I’d like to see. First, I want waterfall and big design up front to go away. Those just haven’t worked on any teams or any situations I’ve been a part of. Second, I want agile stuff be a little less rigid. It’s funny, but the people who are the biggest agile evangelists are generally the first people to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. I’m not excited about using scrum, evo, xp, or whatever the flavor of the day is. All I want is something that works for my team regardless of whether I follow all the rules or not. I think it revolves around a few ideas though:
1) Work in iterations
2) Customer feedback at each iteration
3) Test driven development (Unit and integration tests)
4) Continuous integration
That would be a pretty good start for most teams. Each of those seem pretty simple, but I’d be hard pressed to find evidence of any of these at most shops I’ve been at.
[Reply]