The management and mitigation of risk during the application development process is an important aspect of managing application development, particularly where new or unfamiliar technologies are to be used. There are two closely related elements of risk that arise from the incorporation of new technologies. These are technological risk, which arises from the need for adequate skills to exercise the technologies, and managerial risk, which arises from the need for adequate administration and control mechanisms to ensure that maximum benefit is gained from the use of the technologies. It is the responsibility of a development manager to assess, quantify and weigh the potential benefits of new technologies against the risk involved in their use, and to provide adequate mitigation of these risks.
The issue of configuration management in a distributed, workstation-based development environment is another issue that must be addressed in order to support the large-scale development of workstation-based applications. The use of a local area network as a development platform for such applications has a number of benefits, particularly from the viewpoint of configuration management and control over application resources such as source code, Presentation Manager resources, test data and the like. The use of a LAN provides:
The proper use of a LAN in the workstation-based development environment, and the achievement of the aforementioned benefits, requires the adoption of and adherence to a consistent set of standards in the areas of module naming, access and testing, and a measure of discipline on the part of application developers. However, it is considered that the increased time and effort expended in maintaining these standards is more than offset by the reduced incidence of error and wastage of development time and effort imposed by the lack of adequate coordination and control in a multi-developer project.
The issues of management and control in the workstation-based development environment are of increasing importance as organizations begin to develop and deploy line-of-business applications on workstation platforms. These issues may be adequately addressed by the use of appropriate tools and the adaptation and application of existing management techniques. With the proper care and planning, the maximum benefit may be obtained from the use of the workstation as a development and delivery platform for business applications.