While at RSC 2009 this year, I talk with IBM’s Grady Booch, who you might recall from our discussion at RSDC 2009.

We start out talking about the carpet design in the room, a sort of “early, gothic, bordello.” Next, we continue a conversation we’d been having before filming about, in Grady’s words, “the presence of software abundance in the face of economic scarcity,” which raises the question, as Grady puts it: “how does one attend to economic scarcity in the face of software abundance?” Put another way, software can be an easier to get resource than others in tough times to get an edge in business.

Launching off from this discussion, I wind my around asking Grady about the business/IT alignment talk that I’ve been having with other IBMers at RSC 2009.

Next, having over-heard Grady talk with someone in the hallway about time management issues being a big deal for him now, I ask him for any coping tips he might have to share with other people who has these problems – like everyone in the modern work world. As part of managing his time better, Grady says he’s done around 50 presentations in SecondLife in the past year. Keying off this, I ask him to tell us what’s been going on in SecondLife in the past year or so.

Generalizing this a bit, I tell Grady that I’m usually a very plain text oriented guy so I often don’t “get” people’s desire to use visual communications like video. Nonetheless, I was interested to hear what he thinks things like SecondLife and video conferences add; his answers are pretty compelling.

We then wrap-up by talking about an IBM Research project called MASTOR that Grady showed off during his keynote.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

In this interview from RSC 2009, I talk with IBM’s Neeraj Chandra, who you may recall from two previous interviews at RSDC 2008 and Innovation 2008, last year.

We start out talking about what exactly a “Smart Product” is and how Rational fits into the overall IBM “Smart Planet” vision. Here, the discussion gets into one of the recent Rational tenants: businesses should not only be looking to software for differentiation and value, but are indeed forced to.

The question then, is how IBM helps companies do this: the goals are, of course, desirable, but the devil is always in the details. Part of the story here is the need to bring more discipline to the software creation process as it raises is criticality to the business.

While the IT-side of the equation has to change, there’s also much needed from the business side. We discuss how the business-side needs to change and adapt to these scenarios as well. Neeraj points out that much of this change is enabled by upping the collaborative aspects in the overall Rational portfolio – enabled, of course, by the Jazz platform.

We get back to to how business strategy and objectives map down to IT and the development of software – I ask Nerraj to go over how bodies of practice like Rational’s MCIF are used to map between the two sets of objectives.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored these videos.

In this interview from RSC 2009, I talk with IBM’s Mike O’Rourke, who you may remember from last year’s RSDC series. We discuss this year’s RSC focus on reporting, metrics, dashboards, etc. vs. “low-level” developer tools. As Mike says, this solves a problem where people are “tracking activity in a tool, but not across a whole life-cycle [of software].” Embodying this is the the Insight tool that tracks a requirement across the life-cycle of development, QA, deployment, and so on.

We also discuss how these tools fit in with best practices and establishes methodologies of companies. How do you get a development organization to the point of maturity where they can even start to track how well they’re doing? Mike spends discusses how he does this across the projects he overseas in the Rational portfolio, and maps it back to the generalized case. This also leads into a discussion of the recently released MCIF and how the process therein is hooked into the tooling and reporting in development. I then ask Mike about the team and organization size that Insight, MCIF, and other products work well with.

Shifting gears slightly, I ask Mike to tell us about the past year’s efforts to incorporate the Telelogic tools into the Rational portfolio. Part of this is the ongoing effort to have Rational products built on-top of Jazz, so Mike goes over the road-map for those transitions.

We wrap up with a discussion of the issues that Rational has encountered in moving some of their products to the cloud. I ask Mike for some lessons learned that might be helpful to others doing the same. One interesting practice Mike mentions is getting previews out there to enable richer customer/development feedback on the product, rather than waiting for the 12-18 month big-bang feedback cycle.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored these videos.

While at RSC 2009 this year, I talk with IBM’s Ken King, who you may remember from our discussion about the Telelogic acquisition at last year’s RSDC.

I ask Ken to give us an update on the Telelogic company integration – the Blue Washing – since last we talked at RSDC 2008. We then talk about how Telelogic’s origins in the systems space helps address part of IBM’s idea about Smarter products and connect to the Rational vision of making software a strategic asset.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

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In this interview from RSC 2009, I talk with IBM’s Scott Hebner, who you might recall from two other interviews, at RSDC 2008 and Innovation 2008.

First, I ask Scott to tell us where the missing “D” went off to in the formally named “RSDC,” now simply “RSC.” As Scott says, the name change is about pulling in more than just software developers, that is, people involved in the entire process of delivering software. Indeed, as Scott says, only about 40% of the people in attendance this year were developers.

I then throw out my perception of the major theme of RSC – tools and process that enable businesses to better treat software like a business asset, rather than a black box of annoyance – and ask Scott to go over what those actual tools are. We go over Rational Insight, Focal Point, MCIF, and how Jazz provides the foundation to link all of this together.

One interesting positing that Scott lays out is that this combination of tool and process puts a layer on-top of the software process that allows development organizations to interact with the IT executives, CIOs, CFO and other business leaders in a more automated fashion.

I then ask Scott for more details on the ever elusive goal of IT/business alignment. That’s been a goal of organizations like IBM for a long time, so I wanted to see how it was different this time. Part of it seems to be a making IT more appealing to the business side of the house: letting them use IT, and software, as an actual business asset rather than a budgetary black-hole that seems unmanageable. Further more, the Rational vision is that down the tooling, automation addresses the tedious processes and reporting that would be needed to bubble up this information.

We wrap up with the broader point of software increasingly being not only embedded in so many new products and services, but as part of the business differentiator thereof. As Scott says, “software is becoming the key ingredient in all these products.”

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored these videos.

I was at RS(D)C earlier last week. Rational’s messaging, along with some supporting product announcements, was along the line of what you’d expect from a contemporary IBM software talk: raising the discussion and concerns “up” the chain as close to the business as possible. The talk is less of features and flashy demos (see Bill Higgins’ Jazz/cloud blog for some product-pizaz), and more of what all that can do for a business. Here, the conversation largely boils down to:

• Specifying – tools and practices to help companies describe what they want their software to do. “Requirements management,” we’d call it. Rational, esp. with the addition of Telelogic last year, has a bevy of tools to help collect and track requirements. Ask them why they have multiple tools for this same task, and their answer is that different types of software folks need different types of requirements tracking tools. People who develop “traditional” server/desktop driven software (what most people think of when they talk about developing software) don’t need all the detail and discipline as systems people (or “embedded software,” as it’s more traditionally called), who need “engineer” level seriousness and complexity.
• Practices – continuing the spirit of RUP in the sense of putting together a library of software development practices that companies can choose from. That is, helping companies figure out the best way to go about the day-to-day activity of developing software, from Agile, to water-fall, to whatever fits their needs “best.” Hidden below the management level “IT/business alignment” talk are team-level practices like continuous builds, unit tests, and the usual software development cud we’ve all been chewing over for the last 10 or so years. Here, the Measured Capability Improvement Framework (or MCIF) is the big announcement. From what I can tell of MCIF, it’s sort of like traditional, RUP/CMM/Waterfall development philosophy sent to Agile boot-camp and then shipped off to get an MBA. During an analyst call, Ovum’s Tony Baer called MCIF “management consulting for software,” which put it well.
• Reporting – when any “process” is concerned in the enterprise software world, the “alignment” in “IT/business alignment” means reporting, and then manager making decisions based off that reporting. More than just gathering together a bunch of paper-work, the point of the reporting is to allow The Business to make decisions about the process in question, largely without understanding or participating (day-to-day) in that process. Much to the consternation of software developers everywhere, The Business that decided what development’s fate really have no understanding or care about the actual “craft” of writing software. Instead, The Business wants to establish metrics (fed by inputs from the development process – insert magic enterprise software here! ;>) that roll-up to reports, where those reports tell The Business everything from “is it going to be delivered on time?” to “am I on budget?” to “if I add more money, will be deliver on time…get more features?” etc. Here’s where the other cluster of Rational announcements fit in with Insight and (a bit lower down the chain) Focal Point.

Much of the Rational messaging emphasis the last point, reporting and The Business. The promise is that we’ll (The Business, the non-technical folks who run things) finally solve the problem of knowing what the hell is going on in software development and, consequently, be able to control it like we would any other business asset like, say, a fleet of vehicles or the practices a sales associate uses to stocks shelfs or tries to up-sell customers. The promise is that software will stop being an impenetrable necessity you sink money into, and start being a tool that you, The Business, can use to drive new and improved business strategy and, thus, revenue.

Managing the Impossible

Now, this kind of marketing falls into the category I like to call snidely “isn’t that what was supposed to be happening all along?” We all know that software development is, largely, impossible to manage with easy success: the Standish group comes out every year and tells us how terrible a job the industry does. Software is just difficult, and it has a certain observer effect wherein the more you worry and futz with the process, the more complicated you can make it.

It’s easy to throw rocks at people trying to fix this problem – early Agile Priests made a whole industry out of it! My belief is that maturing software development as a practice will take more time: much more time. As an industry, we seem to have solved the problem of software development with small teams, and there’s also the Garbage In, Garbage Out rule when applied to the process: most companies develop software on the cheap, and are naively shocked when the result is cheap software. Call it the American Software Development Methodology.

Developing “perfect” software is far from being a cheap or quick process, and much “improvement” in software development comes from being pragmatic: scaling back expectations of how much value software can deliver and how quickly the software can get done. Beyond being pragmatic, the next level of getting more value out of software bumps up against the vagueness of “be more like Apple”: maybe the CEO should care about every tiny thing in a business process from how a barista serves coffee to the software that prints out receipts. Or, you could just compete on low-priced goods and crushing your competition. (See Douglas Rushkoff for a sort-of post-captalism take on this.)

In a positive slant, caring more about the software that enables your business is actually part of Rational’s big picture vision.

When you’re your problem…

For many years now, Agile methodologies have been the current silver bullet for solving all our software development process problems. Much of the discussion from Rational of late has been about hoisting up the success of Agile in the small up to Agile in the large – it goes by other names, “Enterprise Agile,” “Agile at Scale,” etc. From what I’ve seen from Rational over the past few years, like most everyone else, they seem to be figuring out how to get ponderously big customers to shift to Agile development.

The part that’s difficult to analyze here is what exactly their types of Agile are (seems to be all?) and if it’s rigged up cheap enough. The danger is that all of the extra layers of “tooling” that give The Business reports and controls are an excuse, intended or not, for Rational and its partners to sell more tools and consulting. That is, does a large company really need to buy all these tools and philosophies from Rational, or can they just be simplify their large and complex (read: expensive) processes? And even in the positive version: how much should you pay to get more simple? To use re-word one of my favorite Mark Pilgrim phrases, “a lot of complexity went into making this simple.”

This is the moment of doubt where the likes of Atlassian jump in, selling functional simplicity for less. The reply from Rational would be that teams of 1,000’s working on things like missiles or global banking systems require lots of complex tooling: I mean, have you seen all the levels of meetings required to develop <Insert State-of-the-Art Airplane or Killing Device Here>?”

…but the problem is worth paying for

The “systems” angle that Telelogic added to Rational gives them a thick snark-shield from the above. Businesses who use software as a component of their overall system (like a car or cellphone) are more capital “E” Engineers than so-called software engineers. We’re told that they require more discipline, thus more complexity, and thus more tools. There’s certainly some feeling of truth there, and you can see that the emphasis that Rational puts on software as an overall component of a business strategy instead of just part of IT fits well here: if software is clearly involved in the core business, it’s worth spending more money on. The alternative is that software is just part of IT (the people who run your email, not your business), who indirectly supports the business and doesn’t so clearly contribute to revenue.

When looking at what Rational talks about and how it positions itself, then, you can expect it to be very similar to one of it’s sister IBM software brands, Tivoli (see Al Zollar above: indeed!), and talk less about the day-to-day life of the IT department employee (developers and operations folks), but more and more about those who consume that IT, The Business. ‘Cause, as they say, that’s where the money is.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and paid travel to RSC 2009. Watch for some upcoming RedMonk videos they sponsored there as well.

I was at RS(D)C earlier this week. After I had the chance to catch up with (newly of IBM) Dave Johnson in the Rational Labs, I got button-holled by one of IBM’s more “2.0” analyst relations guys, Mauricio Godoy for a short video on my take of RS(D)C. Check it out above.

Be sure to click through to check out the index of other interviews Mauricio did at RSC.

Disclosure: IBM is a client.