Business Solutions

If you have read any part of the website, you will have noticed we focus on only that which is valuable to the business imperatives companies face every day.

Let me start with the toughest issue all enterprises encounter, UPGRADING TECH STACKS. 

New software projects start with the latest and greatest of technology available but then over time the technology becomes outdated. I consider that there are the following upgrades required:

1. Dependency Replacement/Upgrades.

2. Framework Replacement/Upgrades.

3. Technology Replacement/Upgrades. 

This could be a good time to share with you about an 'ACTUAL' experience I had at a fortune 500 company. I was working on a team of 8 developers of all skills and the Architects made changes to the core libraries that were not 'backwards compatible'. The architects had no plan for retrofitting the existing code base to conform with the requirements of the new changes. Shockingly,  it was left to the entire team of developers to work through every error and implement a solution they developed. This took 3 weeks. That is the equivalent of 960 hours of work. Can you imagine the cost? With an average cost of $70 per hour, this would bring the total to $67,200 But for me this is the least of the actual cost! The cost will be felt until the delivery of the product, delays and shortcuts are the 'REAL COST'. 

A project with so much waste will inevitably be 'behind schedule' for the remainder of the development lifecycle. This will cause a constant focus on shortcuts for feature development and pressure to deliver features, leading to developer dissatisfaction and friction with business. There is even more, because the deadlines of delivery are more firm as the delivery date grows near, everything in the development cycle deteriorates. This leads to code reviews that are too compromised, bad practices are  excused, and unit testing is reduced. This will have a long-lasting impact on every future development activity.

Why does this happen?  Developers are not skilled and experienced in programming automated code generation. A variation of code projection can be used with intelligence to read code files and make modifications as needed. 

Here is another example... I was asked to make a number of modifications to a database and its programming. The team thought that I would create all of the individual SQL scripts statements to make modifications after performing research and analysis. They estimated that the work effort would be 2 months, I would only need 2 weeks.

How did I accomplish this task in only 25% of the projected time? Code AUTOMATION 

What is Code Automation? To me it is code that will parse code files and use logic to analyze <-> modify the code files. I coded the solution to inspect every file/object type in the database for a list of code phrases and syntax used to trigger code modifications within the file definitions. I realized my solution was so unique that I wrote a White Paper to share the experience. The fellow developers on the team never really accepted the solution as a viable design. It was as if they never understood the solution.

It would be another 5 years before I encountered another opportunity to use the same strategy for modifying a database being migrated to Azure SQL. This is when it occurred to me that the concept of code file parsing as a completely foreign concept they likened to 'Find and Replace'. For me it was truly amazing that a team of Senior Developers found this concept so foreign that they questioned the use of SQL Programming cursors as if it was some database querying programming. This is when I realized code automation is a mindset that is not traditional programming!

At the end of the day, software development is simple but can become complicated very quickly. It is the nature of development teams, to become enthralled with new technology or to resist change (polar opposites). What we do Fundamental Technology LLC, is look for the balance of efficiencies using upgradable code and new code writing. We use all the tools and techniques described and discussed in this site, to help bring 'OPTIMAL' solutions for projects around the world.