There are many excellent tools available to Notes and Domino developers and administrators to help them simplify and automate routine tasks. But IT Factory has taken on a much bigger challenge. Not only does the ITF Tools Suite for Lotus and the related ITF Architecture for Lotus represent a significant advance over using Notes alone to quickly build complex and powerful collaborative applications, they also include unique capabilities to deal with the many problems related to managing these applications.

To highlight the importance of this achievement, let me offer some insight into the problem the ITF Tools and Architecture address--namely, a severe shortage of what is called Process in the art of developing applications for Notes and Domino. In many ways, this latest version of what used to be known as the IT Factory SDK (Software Development Kit) is the embodiment of a software development approach that recognizes the value of Process.

Process to the rescue
In the context of Notes application development, or any software development for that matter, Process is a catch-all term for everything from committing requirements to paper, to creating a formalized change request or bug reporting process, to using some sort of automated code management utility. In simple terms, Process is anything that involves some up-front investment in time and/or money to set up, but once established, serves to streamline the software development effort. To understand this more clearly, take a look at two graphs below, borrowed from Steve McConnell's excellent book, Software Project Survival Guide (at http://www.construx.com/survivalguide/).

Figure A shows a project without Process.

FIGURE A


Here is a project without Process. Roll over picture for a larger image.

We see a division of the effort expended on a project over time. Effort is divided among time spent on implementing and using various types of Process, productive work, or "visible" work, and the inevitable thrashing, which refers to bug-fixing, re-work, and the like.

Lots of us can probably remember being involved in a software project like this. Since the power to develop useful Notes applications is accessible to even a novice programmer, we are especially tempted to dive right in and start coding, with little consideration for process…at first. As scope-creep drives the complexity of the application beyond the initially intended functionality (again, especially easy to do with Notes), as additional developers add their imprint on the effort, and as entire modules of code have to be reworked to accommodate an unforeseen new requirement, the amount of thrashing increases. Finally, upon realizing this, the project team attempts to build-in some process to cope with the problem (e.g., more meetings, more status reports, etc.), which as often as not just makes things worse. If the project reaches the point at which 100% of the effort is spent either on thrashing or on process, it will eventually be cancelled or cut back when management realizes that nothing is being accomplished. If this situation sounds familiar, take heart, you're not alone!