Decided to create a second blog here, one specifically devoted to the topic of software development and the challenges of development in a business environment.

I just shared with my project manager today that I don't think the act of development in itself is necessarily a challenge. There is a reason that so many coding tasks that used to be developers-only tasks ten years ago have become tasks for graphic artists and business analysts today.

HTML design, used to be coders only.

BizTalk is a tool that can be done by non-programmers and still be relatively useful.

SharePoint allows you to manage many functions like standards and document management, as well as scheduling and basic database needs, without wasting your programmers' time.

The biggest challenge for most developers is often less to do with actual programming, and more to do with dependancies with other software resources, with configuration of web servers and networking, with managing security against usability, with designing software so that it serves its purpose in the company while still being easy to maintain.

These challenges are not always so simle to solve, and are often very effective in solving one class of problems while exacerbating other problems.

These are the kinds of topics I'll cover in that blog. So visit the CodingBlog: http://www.pandorasdream.com/blog/CodingBlog.html.

V