Knowing how to remove the bottlenecks that are created in the development cycle of an application is not easy, and not all parts of a composite application in development are always going to be ready in time to do an end time test. That is where HP offers a means to speed things up.
“We have tools and services to facilitate elimination of those bottlenecks to enable that more rapid development cycle. Tools like Quality Centre, Load Runner and Unified Functional Testing allow organisations to manage how they test and do quality assurance of applications,” said Turley.
“They allow them to do performance testing to see whether an application can scale before they put it into production. And crucially they allow them to automate a lot of the testing that needs to happen on an ongoing basis, as new functionality gets added in to these applications.”
Developer facilitation
Facilitating application developers feeling the pressure to turn projects around quickly is a growing industry in its own right. Golgi is a start-up company, spun off from Irish parent company Openmind Networks, that specialises in providing tools for testing and development.
“If you’re developing for the Web and you hit a problem, then there are almost certainly libraries and toolsets out there that you can use to fix it and then get back to what the main point of your app is,” said Brian Kelly, chief technology officer and co-founder of Golgi.
“But when you switch to mobile app development, you find that’s not the case. While you might be occupied with making a beautiful and functional app, you quickly realise you have to spend most of your time writing network code. The level of support for developers out there is really poor, and that’s why we’re in business.”
While things have improved since Golgi was set up in 2012, Kelly said one of the main challenges for developers is how to remain focused on what it is they want their application to do without getting dragged down writing code that is basically generic.
“As a mobile app developer, you’re trying to solve some problem and you want to focus on that, you don’t want to go and reinvent the wheel and write yet another transport stack for your data. That is inefficient and takes up time that would be better used getting the app to market and getting customers to use it,” he said.
“One of the things that got us started on Golgi was finding ourselves rewriting network code every time we made an app and so we adopted lean-stack practices. As we extended, modified or added in new features we kept on finding ourselves breaking our network code, and having to fix it before we could move forward. That was draining.”
Leveraging achievements
According to Kelly, it is particularly frustrating to find yourself working on a problem that you know has been solved multiple times before, and which does not form a core aspect of your application’s unique makeup.
“Anything that a developer can use that leverages what other people have done is really valuable and speeds the whole process up. The environment the average modern app developer tends to work in is resource constrained, especially on the time side of things,” he said.
“It’s important for developers to acquire the discipline of focusing on what it is they’re doing that’s unique and leverage everything else. Broadly speaking, that’s a trend we’re seeing more of across the industry. Companies like Amazon have made it a fact that you no longer need to buy co-location space and drag Ethernet cables into cages to hook up equipment.”
“This is just the same. It’s increasingly about leveraging people who have the main expertise in the skills you need. Getting a really good mobile app out the door under budget and on time requires a large stack of factors that you need to put together. You want to spend as little time as possible working on the common stuff as possible,” he said.
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