The project life cycle for geospatial development projects specifically is changing; in my opinion the development portion of a project used to be as high as 60% rest being shared with design, setup, data, testing and project management.
What is changing is the portion of development compared to design and testing; required time for design and testing is practically doubling whereas development portion is being reduced with around third. Project cost is not changing - just the way the project is portioned. Note that my IT industry vendor friends say cost of the traditional IT projects is actually changing radically - a typical IT development project today costs a fraction of what it did a couple of years ago.
Note that I am also involved with data and strategy projects as well as product-based development. Same changes discussed above seem to affect all types of development projects, but data and strategy project life cycles are typically unaffected.
What are the reasons for this:
1) APIs, SDKs and development tools available today reduce development effort
2) open developer forums and free code samples available reduce development effort
3) standards, frameworks and improved IDEs reduce development effort
4) but having to support multiple devices and environments actually increase development effort and has also a significant effect on increasing testing and design effort
5) agile increases testing and design effort but does not seem to have a real effect on development
6) fragmentation (mobiles and web browsers) increase testing and design effort as compliance requires a lot of additional work
7) future proving your solution is today is a lot harder as IT is changing (too) rapidly. This has an effect on design effort
8) choice is increasing design effort as there is a lot of choice available and all of it very different
9) offline and performance have an increasing effort on all three areas
What do you think - is this something other Geospatial integrators are seeing as well?
What is changing is the portion of development compared to design and testing; required time for design and testing is practically doubling whereas development portion is being reduced with around third. Project cost is not changing - just the way the project is portioned. Note that my IT industry vendor friends say cost of the traditional IT projects is actually changing radically - a typical IT development project today costs a fraction of what it did a couple of years ago.
Note that I am also involved with data and strategy projects as well as product-based development. Same changes discussed above seem to affect all types of development projects, but data and strategy project life cycles are typically unaffected.
What are the reasons for this:
1) APIs, SDKs and development tools available today reduce development effort
2) open developer forums and free code samples available reduce development effort
3) standards, frameworks and improved IDEs reduce development effort
4) but having to support multiple devices and environments actually increase development effort and has also a significant effect on increasing testing and design effort
5) agile increases testing and design effort but does not seem to have a real effect on development
6) fragmentation (mobiles and web browsers) increase testing and design effort as compliance requires a lot of additional work
7) future proving your solution is today is a lot harder as IT is changing (too) rapidly. This has an effect on design effort
8) choice is increasing design effort as there is a lot of choice available and all of it very different
9) offline and performance have an increasing effort on all three areas
What do you think - is this something other Geospatial integrators are seeing as well?