Aviarc® from Core Technology Limited.
Aviarc® is a radical, new software development suite/platform that turns the traditional approach to software development on its head. Aviarc® engenders much closer cooperation between the business and the software developer. The enterprise exploits Aviarc® to drive speed and economy where traditional and agile approaches have often failed.
Aviarc® is generally industry agnostic, it is in use by over thirty diverse public and private sector organisations throughout Australasia, ranging from medium to very large enterprises, state and national agencies. It is now entering the global market.
Aviarc® is almost always deployed in applications where fitness for purpose and operational success are critical.
Aviarc® is a comprehensive solution that enables organisations to conceive, construct, deploy and support, custom developed web-based (software) applications. To ensure organisations are successful when undertaking development projects, Aviarc® fundamentally changes the way each of the software development phases works.
Conceive:
Imagine a software development process, where the non-tech-savvy business users feel like they co-create the software with the developer. Imagine if the requirements/conception process is so effective, that the end solution is guaranteed to be a success!
In traditional software development, the business user(s) will work with a Business Analyst (or programmer analyst) to define the requirements or business needs, in such a way that the business can sign-off and the development process can begin (with Agile approaches this will usually be repeated in smaller chunks). This approach is based on the hypothesis that working software can only be built from the ground up; so it's essential that before we start writing code, that we know what the code needs to do (recent languages like Ruby on Rails can help because they reduce the amount of code required - however they do limit flexibility and still require software to be built from the ground up; so whilst they do incrementally improve the situation, they don't address the fundamental issues).
Aviarc® turns this process on its head; it allows the developer to create working software before needing to add the code. And it does so in a way, where the business users can be actively engaged through the whole process - they co-create the application. This is all done via the web. Being highly collaborative means the business users can (via the browser) interact with the evolving application on a daily basis; through the Business Engagement Manager they annotate and drop "PINS" on the working application (providing instant feedback)
With the Aviarc® model, the "requirements" are replaced by a working application that looks and feels real because it is real, forming the process, interactions and structure of the application, leaving no ambiguity to fog up the construction process.
Construct:
Imagine if construction was so automatable it could be outsourced (to say, an offshore company) and you could all but guarantee to get exactly what you want!
With Aviarc® the effort, cost and time of construction is greatly reduced compared with other technologies, this is achieved because:
- The construction is greatly simplified and automatable, since the ambiguity of what is required is obviated by an effective conception process.
- The conceived application is passed to the constructor as a specification formed by the working application, this greatly reduces time traditionally spent understanding the specification, flow and logic of the overall application,
- The Aviarc® model allows for a radically high level of re-use.
- The Aviarc® architecture allows the developer to start with "working software", this in turn also removes most of the costly plumbing aspects of development.
- The architecture also makes it much easier to detect problems early and to "go back in time" to fix bugs that are encountered by the user,
- Testing is reduced due to automation and an architecture that supports clean separation and linear complexity.
- The Aviarc® architecture also makes interfacing to legacy and third party data, middleware and applications easy.
Deploy:
Imagine if your application could be deployed on a server, cloud, in an enterprise data centre or moved between them at ease! Imagine not having to worry about this or about any implications of this until the application has been constructed. Imagine if your application could be easily made to scale up and down as the workload fluctuates.
Aviarc® is a genuinely unique web application (development) suite and delivery-platform that will run on any server (or PC) that supports industry standard Java. Once installed, every part of the standard software development lifecycle (from conception to support) is carried out through a standard browser. This fully browser based approach, makes Aviarc® ideally suited to the "cloud"; where Aviarc® can be pre-installed on any infrastructure cloud to provide a complete and comprehensive application development environment on demand. Gartner Group calls this Application Platform as a Service (APaaS) and they postulate that APaaS will be a "killer application" for the cloud.
Support:
Imagine if something went wrong with the new custom built application (that might be running in a cloud somewhere), you could have the developer right with you, watching over your shoulder, at the exact time it went wrong! And imagine if they could look into the application at that moment, to see exactly what was happening, what had happened and what was about to happen!
The Aviarc® Temporal Software Engine has a profound effect on how Aviarc® applications can be managed and maintained, either on a private server or in the public cloud. This patent pending technology is highly complex under the hood, yet its effect is to substantially simplify what happens when things don't go as expected.
With the current generation of cloud technologies having emerged largely around software being provided as a service (SaaS), we are now seeing the industry hit the first stumbling block with custom applications - what happens when something goes wrong in such a remote, complex, hard to diagnose environment as a public (or sometimes private) cloud!
When an application that has been conceived using current technologies is ported to the cloud to become a SaaS application and something goes wrong, supporting it is like trying to fix an engine in a very crowded engine compartment in the dark, beside the road. It's hard to diagnose, hard to reach the working parts and hard to fix, and the passengers become disillusioned very quickly. With Aviarc®, everything is either accessed from standards-based servers or natively in the 'Cloud'- from inception to operation. It is entirely native to the web browser. Using Aviarc®, a massive reduction in complexity, cost and support can be realised.
Success:
The greatest impact, however, comes from the fact that the history of endemic failure of software development projects, widely documented as being in excess of 65% to date, can be turned on its head and a successful fit to the enterprise need is guaranteed. Aviarc® projects are characterised as extremely successful in the eyes of both their business users and the development community.
The high degree of innovation in Aviarc® is evidenced by the comprehensive IP protection strategy in place, including applications for a number of patents & trademarks encompassing significant technology and method innovations. In essence the traditionally time-consuming, frustrating and complex process of software development is replaced by joint conception workshops between users and developers. The applications development and requirements gathering phases merge to become a more spontaneous and interactive conception of the shape and form of the application itself. Any remaining detailed, offline work is reduced to a minimum and can be completed subsequently in the construct phase.
Aviarc® has overcome the shortcomings associated with agile approaches to software development through major investments in research and development to provide the right tools to enable the methods to succeed. The Aviarc® ethos is based upon identifying how, uninhibited by known constraints in the software development process; things should work, then attacking the resulting R&D problems from new angles, to create unique solutions. The result may seem like obvious common sense, once you are considering the challenge from a new paradigm; like comparing an internal combustion engine vehicle to a horse and cart. The horse pulled vehicle started from a basic concept and gradually evolved to become more versatile, specialised and efficient, within the confines of its paradigm. For thousands of years it was almost impossible to imagine a fundamentally better approach. Once the internal combustion engine was produced, the horse pulled vehicle became all but obsolete within a few years. So once you understand what the new technology can achieve, why would you want to do it any other way?
Aviarc® is often used to enable enterprises to create "Innovation Centres" or "Agility Centres" to instigate a culture of change, uninhibited by traditional software development constraints - "we can't do that because the computer systems will take eighteen months to change" becomes "we can do that quickly, inexpensively and without getting in the way of other projects"
There are many innovative aspects of Aviarc® as evidenced by the range of patents & trademarks applied for to date.
Essentially, Aviarc® allows the complete separation of "conception" from "construction" when creating new software applications. This is a radical change from the traditional approach, which uses "requirements" capture followed by a design and build process. In contrast to this, Aviarc® allows the application designer and the business users to rapidly co-create working applications, which look and feel real. This natural use of a working application (as the requirements) provides the users maximum flexibility and ensures they know exactly what the final solution will look and work like.
Aviarc® not only turns the traditional approach to applications development on its head, but it does so without disenfranchising either the business or IT. There is no compromise to scalability, complexity, security, standards compliance, portability or supportability. Furthermore it is accompanied by major speed gains and economies both in development and support; and perhaps most importantly, quantum improvements in surety of delivering on business needs.
How is this done?
In addition to separating the application "conception" from "construction", Aviarc® is a unique application (development) suite that will run natively in the 'Cloud'. It is agnostic of operating system, platform and browser. Aviarc® is entirely built upon mainstream standard technologies (for example all the underlying code is written in Java). It exploits a number of patent, groundbreaking, technologies. Such as the Temporal Software Engine that in effect, allows a sort of "time travel" within the complex history of executed application code, together with all its associated data and circumstantial factors. The underlying science may be complicated - but the impact on ease of development, testing and support are profound. Aviarc® also exploits other breakthroughs that allow much greater spontaneity in the cooperation between business user and developer: to the point that the complex software development process merges with requirements gathering, becoming visual and intuitive. This goes a long way to eliminating a huge impediment to successful software development (whether "waterfall" or "agile" techniques are used), by changing a laboured and slow two-step process, into a dynamic one-step process.
A raft of other technical and method innovations combine to enable close and successful cooperation between the user and the developer. The lifecycle of the application changes radically, perhaps for the first time since the 1960s.
Changes aren't limited to the development stage of the application lifecycle. Massive reductions in complexity, cost and support are realised through a variety of means. Such as:
- The speed and economics of application support are changed by the ability to use the Temporal Software Engine to invoke the exact "universe" for the transaction/application/data environment that was in effect when a problem occurred. No more lengthy and complex attempts to "recreate" the problem with incomplete information, no more "let me know when it happens again and we'll try to capture data". Quick understanding of the problem and resolution, without closing down the application, is the new order of the day.
- The Business Engagement Manager provides a self-documenting environment that captures business requirements inherently within the interactive process between the end user and the developer. This enables a software lifecycle where both the user and IT stay fully engaged the whole time. Software development becomes more like a requirements gathering process rather than a development process. Characteristics of this are:
- Allowing Business people to work the way they work
- Allowing IT people to work the way they work
- Enabling full participation and partnership throughout the whole process
- Accepting ambiguity during the initial stages, by using a high-level approach to manage scope and provide flexibility
- The collaborative facility within Aviarc® allows online users to annotate applications by placing colour coded map pins and other symbols on any part of their screen whilst using the application. These are visible to support teams who can simultaneously see feed-back, issues, suggestions and requests for assistance in the exact context of the widget/window/menu - the element actually being used. The whole arcane process of front line support, trouble ticketing, queuing requests for changes, lobbying for simple improvements and awaiting priority and resource: is simplified, made transparent and reinvented in an immediate, intuitive, web 2.0 context.
- Aviarc® exists within the browser but can readily interface to virtually any data source, application and web element, whether legacy or new. Applications can be written in the cloud, redeployed to a stand-alone server, deployed into a private cloud, or used in hybrid implementations. Applications can be scaled by adding servers, instances within clouds, or redeploying to clouds in other geographies and so on. Major operational challenges surrounding security, resilience, scalability, capacity planning, portability, systems migration and disaster recovery are now largely history. Whole industries and rafts of products and systems built up around these traditional disciplines and work-rounds are no longer needed when Aviarc® is deployed.
Once the combined significance of all the innovations within Aviarc® 3 is grasped, it becomes easy to see why innovative organisations adopt it with a view to either:
- making it the hub of their innovation centre,
- or as a way to bypass all the roadblocks associated with their existing way of developing and maintaining applications, with the support and blessing of their IT leadership for whom it relieves time/budget/resource constraints.
What is now proven possible will one day be commonplace and all software development suites will have these capabilities.
Performance:
There are a number of important aspects of performance, such as:
- Fitness for purpose - Does it do what I want and need it to do?
- Does it do it on time and in budget?
- Does it perform as I need it to?
Let us address each of these below:
-
Fitness for purpose:
It doesn't matter how sleek, fast or smart something is, if it doesn't do the job it was bought for, it is a total failure.
We know from well documented studies undertaken by such industry luminaries as Gartner, Standish and IBM that today between 68% and 80% of software developments fail completely or fail to properly fulfil the purpose they were bought for. For example The Standish Group: "24% of application development projects are cancelled or are never used, and 44% are considered unsuccessful (late, over budget or missing features)". Refer: The Standish Group
Aviarc® is designed from the ground up to overcome this massive barrier, in an innovative and comprehensive manner using the raft of innovations described in section 1 above.
-
Does it do it on time and in budget?
Experience to date with metrics collected from earlier, less featured releases of Aviarc; show a return on investment of up to ten times the initial outlay within twelve months, as measured by a major Australian corporate client. Typical experiences are:
- Projects that make deadlines when the CIO has concluded that it cannot be done using other methods,
- Legislated deadlines met consistently,
- Often much more is achieved than the budget would allow using other approaches - "a quart from a pint pot",
- Abandoned-as-failed projects are resurrected and redone successfully from scratch, with less than the original budget.
Early editions of Aviarc® showed productivity gains of 2 X versus .NET and Java. Efficiency gains in developer time, lapsed time, huge reductions in testing time, specification, documentation and reductions in post implementation support costs indicate that applications developed using the most recent release: Aviarc® 3.0 have a compelling total cost of ownership versus other leading development environments such as .NET, Java and Ruby.
-
Does it perform as I need it to?
Aviarc® is developed and runs on all major web browsers, which in effect provides the operating environment as well as many of the aspects of portability, ease of support and deployment needed by the enterprise. In terms of performance, Aviarc® is in use by over thirty medium to very large enterprises throughout Australasia, many of whom have extremely high demands for transaction throughput, reliability and scalability. In almost every case failure or degradation of performance would have a mission critical impact.
In a recent implementation of an application for a famous film industry offshoot that offers online merchandise, transacting and integrated logistics to a global market, there was no way of anticipating how many simultaneous users and transactions there might be. The application was able to be written using Aviarc® 3 in-house and implemented using the Amazon cloud. This highly successful strategy enabled ample scalability by simply adding servers and application instances that could be scaled up or down depending upon demand. In spite of not being able to predict capacity, resource and load: using Aviarc® and the cloud, there were no unpleasant surprises.
Gartner Group (and a range of other industry seers) holds the view that we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way software will be developed, delivered and supported. The economics of the world-wide web, technical changes and intolerance for the traditional shortcomings of the software development industry will together, drive radical change. In summary, they predict that:
- 56% of new business software products will use Web 2.0/Cloud Computing technologies,
- The market for such applications will reach $142 billion by 2011,
- No comprehensive toolset has yet emerged. Gartner says maybe 2011, maturing by 2015,
- Software shops are feeling pain and can no longer compete.
There is ample evidence that the major shortfall in current development technologies and methods (both waterfall and agile) lies principally in the field of requirements gathering. This is best summed up by Davis, Fuller, Tremblay, & Berndt (2006) found "accurately capturing system requirements is the major factor in the failure of 90% of large software projects" echoing earlier work by Lindquist (2005) who concluded "poor requirements management can be attributed to 71 percent of software projects that fail; greater than bad technology, missed deadlines, and change management issues." The cost of this failure is enormous. One study found that failed or abandoned systems cost $100 Billion in the USA alone in 2000. ( See: Browne & Rogich, 2001 ).
We know that CIOs are impoverished by the tools and methods at their disposal and the inertia of an industry that has long since resigned itself to performing below the expectations of the user.
The target demographic for Aviarc® is the enterprise whose CIO commits to meet the need for change and innovation demanded by their Lines of Business: but without the currently unacceptably high likelihood of failure.
In developing Aviarc, we have been privileged to work with industry leaders who have endorsed our view that there is an emerging opportunity to use new age tools to address a gap in the market characterised as the poorly served segment that lies between situational non enterprise systems and enterprise strategic applications.
Whilst there is no doubt that Aviarc® can be used to build and support strategic enterprise systems, our present view is that this segment is currently busily served through package software and in-house traditional methods. However, there is ample "white space" directly below this class of system. This field of opportunity comprises many applications that are backlogged and fall below the radar on grounds of scale, cost based upon traditional methods, resource constraints based upon traditional methods, or being needed by one part of the business, rather than the whole enterprise. We call this segment "Tactical Enterprise Systems".
Most attempts to address the need for Tactical Enterprise Systems involve using updated variations on traditional tools readily to hand. These consist either of over-engineered strategic enterprise systems approaches or situational, do-it yourself applications. Failure rates prove that neither fills the gap successfully:
- In the first instance the application is usually unsuccessful due to cost, time or resource constraint. Most such projects using strategic systems approaches languish on the prioritization queue and fare poorly compared to such projects as ERP upgrades or desk-top refreshes (on average a CIO spends over 80% of their annual budget on maintenance and upgrades to existing systems).
- Situational or do-it-yourself applications are justifiably frowned upon by CIOs for reasons of support, quality, security, scalability, business continuity etc..
Hence the Tactical Enterprise Systems segment is most prone to high rates of failure using traditional methods.
Tactical Enterprise Systems are interestingly also those that typically offer the most opportunity to the enterprise for competitive advantage. Many strategic enterprise systems are designed to "keep the lights on" by providing business as usual process automation that is no different to any other enterprise using that package. The functions these applications serve are the same as for any competing organisations systems, they cannot offer competitive advantage and they just keep up with the Joneses. It is the bespoke Tactical Enterprise Systems that can embody the innovation and competitive differentiation locked up within the enterprise. Hence we have found that Aviarc® is often seen as a key enabler to enterprise innovation and is used as a foundation "Innovation Centre" or "Agility Centre" tool. We call this concept the "Store Front" as it is a natural place for the business to come to IT to serve their tactical systems needs.
Aviarc® has been designed from the ground up to turn the accepted tenets of software development upside down. The emphasis is on creating a common understanding between the user and developer that is more than a disembodied specification; rather it is the substance of the actual finished application. This removes most opportunity for misunderstanding from the development process, along with much of the time and much of the cost.
