In the modern world it is impossible to imagine a software development project planned for 2-3 years and performed with ‘hard’ non-flexible technologies since nobody can predict how the world will change (and consequently, the requirements to the project or applied technologies) within this period. There’s another problem – present day customers who order IT projects very seldom imagine what exactly they need. They can’t clearly formulate their requirements to the software. Moreover, new innovative technologies appear practically every year and they require fast implementation because of fierce market competition.

In such conditions Agile is probably the best solution as it allows starting the project as quickly as possible, introducing details in the course of its realization. The development is carried out within small iterations (1-4 weeks) and at the end of each iteration the customer gets a valuable application (or its part) which can already be used for business process management.

Moreover, Agile can be used in various projects — from small students’ start-ups to serious industrial projects with thousands of man-hours developed by a large software development company. It’s rather difficult to find another approach or methodology with the same scope of application.

The flexibility of Agile methodology is one of the solutions for high efficiency of a software development process. Software companies also have a variety of tools to leverage in order to improve significantly their performance and productivity. Modern project management is impossible without planning and task tracking. Let’s have a look at some of them which, in my opinion, are the best solutions at present.

Basecamp is an online project management system developed by the 37signals company. The functionality of this system is huge and the possibilities are varied. Here are the most prominent features of this system:

Most companies make use of Basecamp as their primary collaboration/task management tool since it has an intuitive interface and can be used even by nonqualified users.

Redmine is a flexible system for project management based on the web application framework RoR (Ruby on Rails). The possibilities of the program include:

Comindware Tracker is a web application for managing business processes and tracking the elements with integrated functions of task management and collaborative work. Comindware solutions are based on the ultra flexible technology ElasticData™, which allows users to manage business processes with extraordinary flexibility and adapt to the existing business processes. Comindware Tracker includes free Comindware Task Management and the technology ConnectStep that allows automating the process of generating tasks for the next step and optimizing their execution practically for all business processes within one or several departments.

This list is not complete. Every software development company makes use of their own favorite tools and techniques. The choice is yours. But one thing is universal – all such tools can improve significantly your competitiveness and thus should be implemented.

The next innovation deals with cyber security – IBM claims that by the year 2016 mankind will be able to do without passwords for getting an access to various resources. Passwords will be replaced by multi- factor biometrics. For example, voice scanning will replace a passport while a fingerprint will replace a password to e-mail. According to professional software developers, unique biological data scanning will assist in solving the problem of data stealing.

‘Mind reading’ or the connection between a computer or a smartphone and a person’s mind can be another expected innovation. Just imagine, you only have to think about a call to a friend and this call will be realized.

One more innovation, according to IBM, is the reduction of digital gap using mobile devices. Mobile solutions will provide an access to information and services of online commerce, e-government, and medical care for the residents the Third World countries and distant regions.

And finally, the fifth innovation is connected with the optimization of analytical technologies, which will allow a person to get only relevant and interesting information. It will increase the range of IT development services offered by software development companies.

Some business applications will provide a mobile access to the corporate database, while another application, named LotusLive Meeting, will allow the users of modern smartphones and tablets (including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and iPad) to take part in meetings, carried out in the global network.

For example, the IBM Corporation has announced a special business application. Thanks to the mobile client for the IBM Sametime platform, employees can exchange direct text messages in the mode of personal or group chat, while another application – Unified Telephony – can be used for making telephone calls. The optimized version of the product Lotus Symphony Viewer will provide a possibility to view office documents in the ODF format (including text files, tables and presentations) on the screen of the device.

The new applications are distributed for free among the owners of licensed copies of the IBM products. In the nearest future business software development will become more and more popular and the announced programs will be available in the official app stores, such as the Apple App Store and the Android Market.

The new SDK, having a simpler API, thanks to more effective emulation and testing tools, provide mobile application development specialists all the possibilities for creating plug-in mobile games for a wide range of Nokia telephones and smartphones as well as smartphones from other producers which correspond to the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.0 and Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) 1.1. standards.

SDK includes SNAP Mobile Client API libraries, environment emulation application, the tool for testing the compatibility of the telephone with the network as well as the examples of applications and documentation, the access to which is carried out from any built-in Java (IDE) development environment.

The latest development SNAP is a significant step for Nokia in terms of developing the new object-oriented API and improving the user interface structure, which simplifies the work of java developers.

Moreover, SDK simplifies the programming itself since it requires fewer API enquiries to the server, especially in case of error recovery and the duration of testing on compatibility is reduced from two to one hour.

Mobile game developers will be able to check their games in terms of conformity to certain requirements, offered by local communication operators and telephones themselves.

In April 2011 Apple presented the service that allows iPhone app developers to introduce a paid subscription for regular updates into their apps.  At this Apple charges 30% from the profit. Some publishers of e-magazines and newspapers have already offered their readers the similar periodic subscription for updating the content.

The Big Fish Games Company became the first game development company that obtained from Apple the right to offer the access to all its releases for $6.99 per month. So far users have paid gaming apps only once when they download it to their devices.

However, the service has got one clear drawback – if the downloaded game requires the Internet connection only for downloading updates, the subscribed gaming service presupposes the wi-fi network availability at least. Moreover, most popular games at the App Store are available either for free or for some small price (for example, the price for the application Angry Birds is $ 0.99), so that’s still a question whether user are ready to pay for the gaming service.

It should be noted that Singly and Locker Project are Jeremy Miller’s developments who is the developer of the XMPP protocol used practically in all instant message exchange programs based on XML. Jeremy Miller started working on the Locker project in February. According to Battelle, the aim of these developments was to provide users with a possibility to control confidential information.

The release of Singly 1.0 will allow software development companies a possibility to create applications with the help of which it will be possible to search, sort and provide users’ contact data as well as the links used by users online. Moreover, the applications developed on the Singly platform will allow searching by the content of the links, sent to the users subscribed to some account in social services.

In future, software developers are planning to expand the functions of the new platform and let is gather financial information and data about the users’ state of health.

The Symfony project has such a success with IT development companies and professional web developers not only due to the intellectual investment of experts in Symfony development, who write new Symfony plugins.  It’s also the efforts of those, who promote Symfony development knowledge exchange and best practices. They also make web application development with this framework as smooth and convenient as it is now.

That’s why the founders of the Symfony project have decided to acknowledge the Symfony volunteers and aficionados in a game fashion. Fabien Potencier and SensioLabs have introduced a new profile-based network of the community members, enhanced with badge-award system. Now the community members can be awarded with different badges for their contributions to the development of the Symfony framework.

But Symfony project acknowledgements are not limited to badge exchange, SensioLabs also announced its Symfony Community Awards in the following nominations:

• Best blogger.
• Best support on mailing-lists.
• Best support on the forum.
• Best support on IRC.
• Best evangelist (awarded for the best networking effort).
• Best contributor (awarded for coding efforts and debugging).
• Personality of the year.

The results will be made public at the beginning of 2012 and will be based on the votes of the community members, who evaluate the contributions of their counterparts.

Business software gives a company a chance to interact with the client via the channels that are most suitable and convenient for him; it allows a company to develop standard marketing, sales and servicing models, which considerably expands the number of potential clients and improves the quality of the service.

When do you need to order business software development?

If your office is filed with papers and documents; if you need much time to find the reports for the previous periods; if you have many orders but you don’t have a convenient tool for handling clients’ orders; if your company has expanded a lot and you can’t manage all workers, calls or orders, time to apply to the IT development company and have your business optimized.

All the above mentioned problems will be solved and your productivity will double. Moreover, the software developers will create special software package customized to your needs.

Once Microsoft gave many professional software developers the hope for well-off and predictable future, having moved the development of its own and third party technologies on the .NET development platform. So far, the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET platform are the most popular and convenient development tools, having adopted the best features of java technologies and having made some important steps ahead. When Microsoft presented the new development tools for writing apps with the help of JavaScript and HTML5, many software development companies started to worry that the .Net development had been folded up. However, the reality has exceeded all expectations – the presented project Roslyn has proved that the .NET platform has exciting future.

The Roslyn technology can be described as ‘compilation by request through the providing service’, although this description is a bit complicated. Technically, the new technology is not a service in comparison with such cloud solutions as SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) or PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). The Roslyn technology is more similar to the Windows system services that offer completely new principles of compiling .NET applications – each phase of compilation is presented in the form of service that can be requested by other applications.

Usual compilers throw away all intermediate data while getting ready-made files and in Roslyn compilers all intermediate data is available via standard .NET API-interfaces. For example, the request to one single API will retrieve the whole syntax tree for the given code fragment in the form of an object. The request to another API can return the number of methods in code.

So far, one can’t predict how soon the Roslyn technology will find its place among standard development tools  – now only the trial version for C# and Visual Basic is available.

Further improvements from Symfony developers have seen the world. On November 2, 2011 Symfony contributors introduced another set of workarounds and programming solutions for Symfony framework in its 2.0.5 version.

Symfony is one of the preferred PHP development tools, no wonder that with such a think tank, supporting this technology, the framework is constantly being refined and with every new release it offers hands-on solutions to the most common web application development issues and makes Symfony development easier.

This time programmers’ community made the following Symfony patches:

• Doctrine (DoctrineBundle unit test, a catch for Doctrine Bridge, Doctrine UniqueValidator to support associations).
• Added Doctrine and Twig dependencies to Composer.
• Fixes to HttpKernel (patches to profile saving and profile parent/children processes).
• Routing enhancements (PHP matcher dumper, deleted unnecessary variable).
• HttpFoundation improvements (query call, PHP 5.4 regression).

This is just a very brief example on what work has been done by Symfony developers to make their daily Symfony development tasks easier and faster. To see the full list of changelogs, compare the new Symfony release to the previous one, leave your comments or share your Symfony development ideas, go to this development contributors’ community or to official Symfony development framework website.