How do you create a 100th Monkey software development culture?

Someone reading my now ancient C++ coding standard recommendation for using doxygen to automatically generate documentation from source code, asked a great question:

I've often considered using doxygen, I always ask myself - is this really useful? Would I use it if I were new to a project? Would programmers working on the project use it?

I'll rephrase their question to more conveniently express a point I've thought a lot about: Why do companies put so little effort into automating their own development process to make development easier?

It's like the hair stylist whose own hair looks like someone cut it using a late night infomercial vacuum cleaner attachment. Or it's like the interior decorator whose own house looks like a monk's cell.

Software organizations rarely build software to make developing software easier. Why is that?

Because there are three ways changes are made in an organization:

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Heterogeneous vs. Homogeneous System Architectures

I follow a certain philosophy when developing system architectures. I assume that very few systems will ever exist in a consistent form for more than a short period of time. What constitutes a “short period of time” differs depending on the specifics of each system, but in an effort to quantify it, I generally find that it falls somewhere between a week and a month. The driving forces behind the need for an ever changing architecture are largely business requirement based. This is a side effect of the reality that software development, in most cases, is used as a supporting role within the business unit it serves. As business requirements (i.e. additional features, new products, etc.) pour forth, it is the developer’s job to evolve their software system to accommodate these requirements and provide a software based solution to whatever problems lay ahead. Given that many businesses can be identified as having the above characteristics, I can now begin to explain why I believe that Heterogeneous System Architectures hold a significant advantage over Homogeneous System Architectures, in many distributed system cases.

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Platform virtualization - top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined)

In this article they present the companies which offers means (mainly, the software and hardware) which powers most of the cloud computing hosting providers, namely virtualization solutions.

Read the entire article about Platform virtualization - top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined) at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.

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