by webadmin | Jan 29, 2011 | general
A friend sent me an article the other day. The intro says, “States’ shrinking IT workforce: The worst is yet to come: A survey by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers finds that states are facing critical shortages of IT workers, made worse by furloughs, hiring freezes and stagnant salaries. And the retirements of many older workers loom.” Of course, the big impact of this situation is on the ability of the States to support their legacy applications. The people who are retiring are not the 24-year-old Java or .NET developers, they are the 58-year-old COBOL programmers. You can read the article here: http://gcn.com/articles/2011/01/27/states-it-worker-shortage.aspx Unlike the “Year 2000” or Y2K crisis, the date for hitting the wall is not always clear. Right now, the 50-and-up age group is the only one where employment is actually increasing. Why? Well, too many people are discovering that with disappearing home equity and the decrease in other investments, they can’t afford to retire any more. But, if the economy ever does truly pick up, or if they just get tired, you can bet those older workers will leave in a heartbeat. For the States, this situation is very serious, but not urgent. Nobody is running around like Chicken Little… yet. But, the only way out of this situation that keeps the systems running and the services delivered safely and reliably is to modernize those older applications. We can typically redo a system in a year, but others take longer (perhaps 2 years, perhaps 3). If you look at a 3-year window, and you don’t start until your staff actually retires, the...
by webadmin | Jan 24, 2011 | general
Some people look at our technology and focus immediately on the tools. While we think the tools are great, successfully building software has a lot more to do with your process or methodology than it does with your tools. You can do automated redevelopment (what we do) or wholesale line by line translation, or rewriting by hand: but if you don’t have a process for getting the job done, the odds are that the outcome will be a failure. Our software development methodology, QuickStep(tm) has a number of features specifically for modernization, but it also handles new development (just like our tools). We also have a software application called ResQTrack that supports the methodology and even helps to enforce certain aspects of it. QuickStep is repeatable, and is tailored to each project; it supports multiple teams working together, and they can be located anywhere in the world. Using ResQTrack, we not only enforce the process, but we monitor it and measure the results. ResQTrack allows us to assign and monitor tasks, collect labor and cost data, maintain and allocate requirements to tasks and tests, maintain and share a secure project library, keep a record of technical communications, and publish process documentation and design information. We would have to install 5 or 6 external software packages to do the same thing, and they would not be integrated. This way, we have good support for the software engineering process, and can give a customer up to the minute visibility into the project. Let us know if you’d like to give it a...
by webadmin | Jan 18, 2011 | general
Blogging… in some cases, blogs seem pretty self-indulgent. Narcissistic, even. Do you spend time reading blogs? I usually don’t, unless the blog tells me something interesting. So that’s going to be our guideline here. My forum name, Big Iron, pays tribute to my background as a mainframe programmer. In the old days, we had titles of programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. We didn’t call ourselves “developers”, far less “software engineers”. I wrote my first program in IBM Autocoder on a 1401. Using coding sheets and a pencil. Seriously. And it even worked! Over the years, there was a lot of FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, SAS and SPSS and RPG. Then came the transition to client-server computing, mostly on Sun and Data General, and then the PC platforms. And now, I help people rebuild those old systems using new technology, for a new lease on life. I may say things here that are controversial. Sometimes, I may take a position to promote discussion and argument. Hopefully, whatever you read here will be thought-provoking, and will contain something of value that you can use in your regular work. Welcome to our...
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