Chillisofters speaking about software development sustainability at DevCon 2019, in Mauritius

By Anujah Bosman, CEO, Chillisoft Solution Services.


Johannesburg, 09 Apr 2019

Chillisoft focuses on sustainable software development, while adding pragmatic value. It specialises in practices and skills to enable software development sustainability while considering the people, practices, technical and socioeconomic dimensions. Chillisoft's multidimensional approach caters for the rapidly changing requirements in the complex world of software development.

As part of its ongoing research, Chillisoft regularly seeks feedback from CTOs regarding their pain points. Its engagement with CTOs so far has indicated that sustainable software development within the current socioeconomic and technical environment continues to be incredibly challenging, and their number one concern. It is for this reason that two of Chillisoft's senior seasoned software developers, Brendon Page and Mark Whitfeld, have chosen to talk about pivotal practices, techniques and skill sets that are and will continue to be needed by software developers and business.

Chillisoft's senior seasoned software developers Mark Whitfeld and Brendon Page.
Chillisoft's senior seasoned software developers Mark Whitfeld and Brendon Page.

What is software development sustainability? It is the capability to continue to be available in the future and to adapt to meet new customer and business needs. There are various models and factors that impact capability for sustainability. However, on a pragmatic level that is comprehensible to software developers and CTOs, Chillisoft has found that test-driven development remains a keystone habit and a pivotal practice impacting software quality and the resiliency of the code, thereby impacting software sustainability.

Whitfeld's talk will be about applying TDD to Brownfield projects. This talk is particularly relevant to CTOs and software developers because it provides them with a "how to" option of refactoring existing systems and gradually increasing the code quality instead of incurring exorbitant costs of a rewrite. Page will address the niggling feeling that tests are so expensive to maintain in a fast-paced business environment. Page imparts many years of pragmatic knowledge obtained from maintaining tests through upgrades, refactoring and system rewrites. He will also talk about the "Implementation Knowledge Principle".

Another key shift Chillisoft has noticed is the skills shift that is required in many in-house software development teams, particularly in South Africa. Many in-house software development teams have been focused on developing platform-specific applications, but cloud adoption has increased the focus on Web applications.

JavaScript in the browser is becoming a large component of the modern application. The semi-connected environment within which it runs is providing interesting challenges to the developer. One of the biggest of these challenges is regarding the management of the state of an application. How do we keep the application state consistent with its representation on the server? How do we manage the offline scenarios? How do we handle responses that return in an unexpected order? How do we manage and represent a transient and local UI state? These are questions that need to be considered by the developer and in response a few design approaches have emerged.

Whitfeld will focus on NGXS, a state management library and how it provides the power of the Redux pattern while reducing the boilerplate code to an absolute minimum by using constructs that are more familiar to angular developers.

Come and listen to these great talks at https://conference.mscc.mu/.

For more information about Chillisoft's courses, please refer to DevFluence.io or contact the company at info@chillisoft.co.za.

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Editorial contacts

Anujah Bosman
Chillisoft Solution Services
anujah.bosman@chillisoft.co.za