
Quality Middleware on Internet Time

With the emergence of business on the Internet, some companies are experiencing a shift in their user base, or discovering new markets. The main ICSE program kicked off Wednesday morning with a keynote address on that very topic by Daniel Sabbah, VP of the Application and Integration Middleware Division at IBM.  He identified several effects that it has had on his group.  Perhaps the most dramatic is the shift from two-year development cycles on stable technology bases, to the half-year cycles on Websphere with a rapidly shifting (Java) technology base. To do it, they’ve had to do less.  Less means scenario-based design, flexible patterns, proper abstractions and ‘just in time’ delivery of technology – just enough technology to solve the problem at hand. Along with this goes the somewhat controversial notion that “quality is always in the eye of the beholder”, rather than simply absolute, and, that measures of quality need to take the user expectations into account.
— Garry Froehlich
