Some thoughts on perfect application development

While developers do need development environments that support new approaches to developing code that works and that help speed and improve the application development process, they also need tools that help them move beyond code. In particular they need a development environment that:

Ensures that decision-making logic is managed declaratively as a set of business rules
Integrates analytics into this decision-making logic in a useful way
Helps them put process or workflow into a process management tool
Helps them define events and how events will be correlated and processed

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John Reynolds had an interesting post a little while back where he shared some thoughts on Perfect development tools. His emphasis was on support for things like iterative and test-driven development but it seems to me that there is also a need to move application development beyond code.
While developers do need development environments that support new approaches to developing code that works and that help speed and improve the application development process, they also need tools that help them move beyond code. In particular they need a development environment that:

Ensures that decision-making logic is managed declaratively as a set of business rules
Integrates analytics into this decision-making logic in a useful way
Helps them put process or workflow into a process management tool
Helps them define events and how events will be correlated and processed

As long as development environments assume that everything can and should be written as code, I do not believe they will be “perfect”. Code is the right way to do a whole bunch of things in application development but organizations are discovering that new tools for managing events, processes and rules are effective at increasing agility and bringing business users into the application evolution process. Similarly the importance of analytics is only growing. Excluding application developers from these trends is in no-one’s best interests. A perfect development environment should support these concepts and integrate it with tools for effective code development.

I have blogged before about Application Development 2.0 as well as the power of business rules in model-driven development/agile and the ways in which decision management affects the Software Development Lifecycle.

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