Building apps on the fly

When Stephen Aldridge, the president and CEO of Bio Economic Research Association (Bio-ERA), needed help earlier this year developing a Web portal and its associated applications, he called on Assembla, a small software development company in Needham, Mass.

The call went out and a geographically dispersed team of developers came together almost immediately. Andy Singleton, Assembla founder, brought together and managed developers in Ekateringburg, Russia, who worked with Bio-ERA employees in the United States. The far-flung team collaborated by using the open-source portal software XOOP (eXtensible Object Oriented Portal) in conjunction with Assembla’s project-management platform, PowerSteering, launching the portal within weeks.

The project amounted to a radically different way to build software and may foreshadow the future of software development. Low-cost app-dev talent is located around the world, and with Internet-based, open-source tools available for collaborative application development, teams can now come together quickly to get a job done. This Hollywood style of bringing together talent for specific jobs is one more way for chief technologists to fashion more dynamic platforms.

Many enterprises are moving toward this dynamic development model, including Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) in Fort Worth, Texas, which works with offshore outsourcer Infosys Technologies in Bangalore, India. Sun Microsystems, in Sunnyvale, Calif., is nurturing an open-source development project with the help of CollabNet, in Brisbane, Calif. These teams are seeing real benefits from distributed software development.

For IT executives seeking to avoid the complex tasks of software development, the ability to form just-in-time teams using outsourced talent allows them to concentrate on running their core business.

“As we generate more and more people educated in writing code, and as we see the practicality of using such software-capable people from around the world because of the capability of [Internet-based collaborative] networks, it seems apparent that the use of distributed application development is inevitable,” says Christopher Myer, former director of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s former Center for Business Innovation and co-author of Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy.

Myer says that collaborative work, inspired by a Web-based, open-source approach to development is making distributed development easier to accomplish. “The chief complaint businesses have with their software infrastructure is that it can’t change as rapidly as their business needs to adapt to a volatile environment,” he says. “[Chief technologists] need to open their minds to distributed, emergent, eclectic models of creating software.”