The Hindu Business Line : Rapid fire

FOR taming wild software schedules, read Rapid Development by Steve McConnell. Conceived as a `common sense' for software developers, writes the author in his preface. A taste of the `uncommon' stuff:

When a project is behind, adding people can take more productivity away from existing team members than it adds through new ones. It's like pouring gasoline on a fire.

If you release a low-quality product on time, people will remember that it was low quality — not that it was on time.

One of the toughest obstacles to meaningful software scheduling is that usable, concrete information about software scheduling is hard to come by. The information that is available is usually found in one of two forms: It is either embedded in software-estimation programs, which at this time tend to be expensive ($1,000 to $10,000 or more); or it is in books with dozens of equations and multipliers, and it can take days to learn enough just to make a ballpark estimate.

About 40 per cent of all software errors have been found to be caused by stress; those errors could have been avoided by scheduling appropriately and by placing no stress on the developers.

One of the costliest mistakes in software development is to develop software that is ultimately rejected by the customer. You can't achieve rapid development if you have to develop the software twice.

In general, measurement is an effective risk-reduction practice. The more you measure, the fewer places there are for risks to hide. Measurement, however, has risks of its own.

A better book than a thriller, if you have a choice.

XML world

EXTENSIBLE Markup Language (XML) has emerged as an important format for moving data over the Web. If you want to develop enterprise XML solutions to enable seamless data exchange, read Developing XML Solutions by Jake Sturm.

A Digital Nervous System (DNS) will provide the corporation with a computer and software infrastructure that will provide accurate, relevant data in a timely manner. The ideal way to move data in DNS will be XML.

Windows DNA (that is, distributed Internet application architecture) provides a framework for designing, building, and reusing software components to build a DNS.

The most basic components of an XML document are elements, attributes, and comments.

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) version 1.1 is an industry standard designed to improve cross-platform interoperability using the Web and XML.

Two types of headers are available in HTTP: request headers and response headers.

Before you head for the book, my request is: Check whether you want to get into hard-core programming.

SOAP up

BRIAN E. Travis's XML and SOAP programming for BizTalk servers would be quite a googly if you thought there wasn't more.

SOAP started life as a way of invoking DCOM methods in a more loosely coupled way than regular COM method invocations.

XML is a less threatening route than full-blown SGML and could therefore get people hooked on the joys of descriptive, hierarchical data mark-up. From XML, the jump to the rigours of SGML would be tolerable.

The last major problem with DTD is that a document can have only one document type to describe the entire document, making it fairly inflexible.

A BizTalk server is the software that reads and processes BizTalk documents.

Some really cool tools are coming along to help developers deploy systems that can communicate between you and your trading partners.

ROPE (that is Remote Object Proxy Engine) depends on the existence of an XML file tagged according to the Service Description Language (SDL).

Hope you haven't done the `rope trick', after reading all the jargon.

(Books courtesy: WordPower, Chennai. www. wppublishers.com)

Tailpiece

"Whenever I see a mosquito, I remember... "

"The coil or the spray?"

"No, the taxman."

hindubusinessline@hotmail.com

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