Were a person to open a retail store it’s unlikely they would trouble themselves with building the physical location from the ground up: laying foundation, wiring the walls, or installing the plumbing. It’s more probable an executive would focus on creating value important to the business, such as choosing selection and display, and simply move into a space that satisfies the physical needs of the enterprise. This is effectively what Fernando Cardenas and AppVenture are providing the software industry: application generation tools that automate the coding process, enabling software designers the ability to design and generate applications with thousands of lines of code in hours instead of days or weeks. Cardenas, founder and CEO of the company, believes the promise of his product “allows a business to focus on the business, rather than the technology,” behind software development.
Software development is an industry with a staggering failure rate; according to The Standish Group, somewhere around 70% of software products fail. Yet even in the face of this figure developers have continued the decades-old practice of beginning each new project from the ground up, dedicating time and money to mundane aspects of the coding and in the process tying up resources that might be better spent designing the business functionality of the application. Reflects Cardenas, “This could be a hard sell if most software projects were hugely successful, but that’s not the case.”
The Foundations platform offered by AppVenture attempts to address the major failure of previous efforts at automation by generating entirely open code, allowing a developer to modify or extend any aspect. Cardenas believes this technology-independent approach is a huge differentiator between the AppVenture product and his competitors, as other products lock up a developer’s ability to manipulate the blocks of code generated from their applications. Additionally, the Foundations product offers a drag-and-drop interface, allowing designers to visually construct the relationships between objects, as well as screens and wizards that enable the developer to define object attributes and create user interface elements. Once the object relationships have been defined the application then generates the code, the unit tests, and the supporting documentation. Developers can then go back in and add any specific business logic or customization on top of the infrastructure generated.
From a sales perspective AppVenture has been received warmly on the business side of companies, as C-level executives have been intrigued by the prospect of simultaneously saving money while spending more time focusing on the business logic behind software. Some software developers, however, have been slow to embrace change, perhaps in part because they feel adoption of Foundations could redefine their budget or impact their compensation, while also being skeptical the product will deliver on promises they have heard before. Yet Cardenas believes market forces will eventually win the day: Those who adopt automation will use the resulting time dividend to more swiftly produce higher quality applications with more features and a friendly user interface, while old school practitioners could find themselves bidding jobs long on both days and dollars.
To date the company has been bootstrapping, but will likely look for funding to speed sales and marketing efforts and further development. Future upgrades currently in the works for release 2.0 include allowing the user more control (e.g. modifying templates, adding actions) as well as enabling selection of the underlying architecture at the time of generation (current release uses Domain Driven Design). The company is also working to strengthen its IP position with two patents pending relating to the way the product generates the code. A 45 day free trial is available at www.appventure.com.
It will always be easier in software production to make demands on the business side than execute on the development side. Yet the evolution of automation, if history is any guide, promises to drive down the cost of failures and compress the time between request and delivery. One need only think of the efficiencies gained by the adoption of CAD in the car industry to imagine the impact this type of product could have on application design. No industry can tolerate a 70% failure rate over the long term, and AppVenture seeks to move the ball forward.
