Recently our team wanted to add some more features into an existing app built on Rails 2.3 about 2.5 years ago (July 2009). We ended up in a situation that in order to proceed adding new features we have to upgrade to Rails 3.1. The primary reason being that we were using outdated technology and there is a difficulty in maintaining our legacy (2.5 yr old) app by getting support and documentation. The migration also was not smooth, we spent time looking at screencasts, tutorials, documentation and forums to move ahead and after a good deal of effort the migration happened. At one point during the migration there was also second thoughts to rewrite the app from scratch as the migration was labour intensive.

This event made me feel that we might be heading towards disposable software. Keeping the life cycle of the rapid development tools in mind should we design cost effective disposable software? By taking the example of How to Create a Blog from Scratch Using Ruby on Rails in simple steps, I believe that we might be heading towards a solution of disposable software. A large application could be built using many pieces of disposable software if we take care of data integrity during upgrades or replacements and effective communication between applications.

The questions that arise are; How long is long enough to dispose the software? Software development costs are ever increasing, will this model fit enterprises? Will this mindset make software accessible to the masses at a cheap cost?

My take on the questions.

Q. How long is long enough to dispose the software?

A. We could take around 2-3 years for a software to be useful for us before we reach out for an upgrade.

Q. Software development costs are ever increasing, will this model fit enterprises?

A. My experience with enterprises is very limited, as far as I know the huge cost in procurement of an earlier version has been a mental block for organizations to go for a timely upgrade. If we make software development faster and cheaper then there is a high chance of regular upgrades.

Q. Will this mindset make software accessible to the masses at a cheap cost?

A. Right now many services are beginning to become available for super cheap cost empowered by the cloud, it could be possible in the near future that people can get made to order software at a cheaper price.

Just a decade ago the amount of memory for a typical desktop was in the lower 3 digits of MB. 15 years before it was in 2 digits of MB. Yet we had email clients, browsers, word processors, spread sheets, image processors. I read about one financial analyst’s perspective about the inflation and taxation in America. It is such that the purchasing power of money in your hand after taxes is significantly lower than the inflation adjusted money’s purchasing power in 1950. For example; if someone sells her house for in 1950 and then the amount of purchasing power that money had after the tax was significantly higher than what it could do in 2012. The direct and indirect taxes have risen and the inflation has masked the effects of it.

While writing this, I am doing so in a machine which has 8GB RAM, 500GB hard disk and i7 processor. That is a 250 times increase in my computing power than 15 years ago. Though the frequency of the crashes I encounter has reduced to a great deal, there are still crashes and non responding apps which annoys at times. I have observed that the thought “memory has become cheaper than efficient programs” is prevalent for most of the applications barring a few which demand performance. Take a look at the hardware of the Apollo Guidance Computer. We were able to land on the moon with that piece of hardware, but right now even with such excellent hardware we many times end up with non responsive websites. With a workload of just above 1000 concurrent users some web sites can easily choke the best hardware they are running in.

Is there a way that the generous doses of memory and computing power could be used effectively or will be waiting for something like water scarcity or environment pollution to happen to learn to use the hardwares efficiently?

Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on Norden Bombsight shows how anyone can get obsessed with technology and accuracy but miss achieving the objective. The bombsight was invented to accurately drop the bomb on target so that lesser amount of people are killed and war comes to end quicker. The military spent a lot of money to develop and use it, and went to the extent of using the technology even to bomb hiroshima where accuracy was not necessary due to the destructive power. Wars lasted longer and the objective (bring the war to end with less loss of life) of bombsight was never achieved even though billions were spent on its development.

Software technology choices are similar, there are lots of new tools and many platforms that help us rapidly develop applications. The obsession to use the latest, cutting edge technology is so great that people take pride in showcasing their tool list once the project is delivered. The illusion created by the power of the tools is such that it gives a sense of great ability that we will be able to translate any requirement from the client into software in no time. Someone somewhere said that the computer can speed up the errors committed by humans, it is true especially when we concentrate on technology and automation more and more into every day’s work with less and less effort to question the requirements.

Subconsciously every one is concentrating on getting things done. Definition of done is often not put in the right way, if success of the software project in every one’s mind is to release before New year then people the actions and choices will be purely on getting out before New year. The emphasis on getting the project out faster would have eventually masked why the software was needed in the first place. Information technology which is supposed to help process information might merely be helpful in creating data capture tools because no technology can effectively capture requirements, anything which is captured often end up being lost in the translation.

Getting the definition of done right involves people in every discipline to work closely together. A project’s definition of done would be to help each individual get more work done with less exertion through the new software but instead of defining that the business owner might give a laundry list of things for the developers. A wannabe marathon runner training for strong legs is different from training for marathon runs. Training for strong legs alone will not help in running a marathon but it is one of the by-product of marathon training. Often requirements are just by-products or snapshots of a what an end product is going to be in a complex system. As far as I have observed successful developers are the ones who get as much information as possible about the system and put in an equal effort in getting a working software out without translation loss.

A helpful link given to me by one of the peers http://taotwit.posterous.com/vpec-t-a-thinking-framework-presented-to-scio

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