As a developer you are the tailor, with access to configuration-ready suits and the ability to make edits to a suit as needed. You work with your customer, understand their needs, and guide them to the right configuration for their purpose. You help them try on the closest suit possible to what they need, and then you do your finishing work after you’ve met. When your customer comes back, together you try on the fitted suit and hopefully it is exactly what they need at that time. As that customer grows (or shrinks), you can help modify the suit so they get the most life out if it as possible.

What don’t you do? You don’t weave and dye your own fabric. You don’t re-invent cuts or create your own button holes. You don’t make your own buttons. In short, you don’t start from scratch. The result is that suits are made faster and relatively less expensively, and your customer gets what they want.

Agile Developing for the Enterprise Using PaaS

As more businesses and organizations begin to adopt agile methodologies to improve customer responsiveness and rapidly develop applications, it would seem that software tools have to be agile-ready. So far, most of the focus on those agile tools happens to be on the project management and delivery lifecycle phases, but what about the actual development of applications? Developers must examine how application creation tools can best support agile software development as a business strategy.

One example that comes to mind is the development of internal business applications. In the past, it was virtually impossible to build custom, enterprise-grade applications for every department. Now, because the current generation of users is so web savvy, having to deal with hard-coded legacy database applications and spreadsheets is not only ill-conceived and impossible to manage, it can ultimately lead to increases in operating costs and be rife with error.

The primary response from IT organizations has been to decouple the information from the application. Such is the nature of SOA/XML. That’s fine for the IT developer, but completely unusable from a departmental end-user standpoint – the people who have to use the data and face the information management challenges on a daily basis. They still have to rely on an in-house development resource or highly paid consultant to get to that data in a meaningful way that integrates with their work processes.

PaaS can be the ideal solution to solve that problem by making it extremely easy to design, develop, adapt and service web-based applications, while leveraging a comprehensive enterprise-class service environment. It is so easy to build apps that a significant amount of development and changes can be realized in a single meeting or overnight. This gives the user access to new functionality almost immediately. And very savvy users can even make the modifications themselves – simply by changing configuration options – offloading minor development tasks from the coders.

Our new whitepaper “PaaS and Agile Development: The Application Platform for Enterprise Transformation” covers everything a CIO, software product manager, scrum master, or architect needs to know about leveraging PaaS as part of an Agile strategy.

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