The
most popular responses were testing and quality assurance,
from 52.8 percent of respondents, component development/code
reuse (47.0 percent), modeling and design (45.5 percent) and
collaboration and team development (42.6 percent).
By contrast, the least popular response was
on the issue of managing hiring with H-1B visas (1.5 percent).
An H-1B visa is a U.S. temporary work permit given to a
non-U.S. citizen with special expertise, upon sponsorship by a
U.S. company.
Other low-scoring topics included the
Linux/SCO lawsuits (3.1 percent), indemnification from
litigation (4.0 percent) and domestic outsourcing (6.8
percent). Offshoring development was slightly more popular,
with 12.4 percent of readers stating that this was a
top-of-mind topic.
But even though litigation didn’t rank high
on the scale, it was of significant importance to some
respondents. “Even though this might look like a non-related
issue to software development it actually is,” wrote Paresh
Yadav, CTO of Saint Technologies. “Litigations by corporate
bullies in IT industry to stall innovation using unfair
methods, mainly frivolous litigations. I am not against patent
or copyright for real hard research work but sometimes we all
know patents are granted for a very basic idea and proposed
methods.”
Gordon McKeown, technical director at
Facilita, agreed. “Software patents are a ligature around the
throat of small companies,” he wrote.
Other top topics included application
life-cycle management (41.3 percent), system and software
security (38.0 percent), agile development (36.9 percent) and
business process management (33.8 percent). Clearly less
important were themes such as developing 64-bit applications
(10.4 percent), regulatory compliance (11.0 percent),
aspect-oriented programming (11.5 percent) and moving up the
Capability Maturity Model scale (11.5 percent).
Open-source development, at 28.5 percent,
ranked toward the middle of the scale—but that doesn’t mean
that it was popular. “A lot of the press seems to get overly
excited about open source vs. proprietary development,”
admonished Doug Stein, vice president of development and
technology at Learning.com. “Precious little is focused on
what’s best for the customer and what rewards the shareholder.
Too much seems to be the geek equivalent of the silverback
males pounding their chests.”
Another topic that was in the middle of the
responses is the current buzzphrase, service-oriented
architectures (31.6 percent). “SOA is high on our agenda, and
developing an appropriate enterprise service bus is proving
more challenging than first thought,” wrote Robert Leidl,
chief technology officer at Powerlan.
The SD Times readership issues survey was
conducted in late February, and had 453 respondents. The
statistical accuracy of this research is 3 percentage points.
To view the original ST Times article,
please
click here.
Quality
Is Hot, H1-B Visas Are Not 
