Peter Coffee

When the subject is software, the concern for today and tomorrow is quality. IT community concerns are apparent, for example, in the current draft program for next months International Conference on Quality Software, scheduled to take place in Dallas on Nov. 6 and 7. Presentation topics during those days will include test-case generation from software […]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY iRise Application Simulator 3.0 Far more successful than any other attempt weve seen to enable application design by nonprogrammers, the 3.0 release of iRise Application Simulator gives business unit stakeholders a clear idea of Web application appearance and behavior while communicating their requirements to downstream development staff. Application Simulator 3.0 costs $250,000. KEY […]

If Microsoft Corp.s Visual Studio .Net doesnt already give a developer enough knobs to turn and buttons to push, Compuware Corp.s DevPartner Studio Professional Edition 7.1 should fill the bill nicely with its extensive array of coding quality assurance aids that are aimed at the new opportunities—and challenges—of the .Net platform. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY DevPartner Studio […]

Its no small trick to make software source code analysis a pleasure, but the excellent design and open-ended flexibility of Parasofts Jtest 5.0 combine to eliminate a developers excuses for releasing anything but the most refined grade of Java. At different stages of a project, a developer can mean different things by the simple word […]

When developers arrive this week in Los Angeles for their annual feast at the Microsoft table, theyll get more appetizers than entrees. Considering the ravenous appetites in this crowd, its surprising to see them flocking to a place where the sign reads “Dinner will be served in three years”—which is when the “Longhorn” version of […]

When application developers open the stark black box containing the four CDs of Apple Computer Inc.s “Panther” OS, theyll get more than the newly polished end-user experience of whats already the worlds most widely used version of workstation Unix. That fourth CD contains Xcode 1.0, Apples integrated development workbench for AppleScript, Java, and native C/C++/Objective-C […]

People often misquote Murphys Law as stating, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” This misses an essential element of the Law: one that ought to be part of our thinking about what it means to build good systems. Murphys mantra comes to mind with the special appearance of Edward A. Murphy III, son […]

The ultimate instrument of torture in the late Douglas Adams novel “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” was the Total Perspective Vortex—a chamber in which the victim was forced to see “the entire unimaginable infinity of creation” with the victims tiny self shown to accurate scale. A software developer firing up a copy […]

Digital media creation, delivery and management are growing at roughly three times the pace of all other IT needs, estimated IBM Vice President for Digital Media Warren Hart when we spoke earlier this month in Los Angeles after his keynote speech at the ContentWorld conference. The nature of those tasks—intense computational workloads during content creation […]

The digital media revolution often seems to be centered on the badly managed migration of traditional entertainment to the Net. Theres plenty of drama in the music and video wars, but thats not where the enterprise opportunity lies. The same technologies can create new customer relationships, develop new supply chain alliances, and use cost-effective computing […]