Getting Developers on Board

There’s a lot of focus these days on how to better manage applications, but what about the developers that build those applications?Jason Van Zyl, CTO of Sonatype and the creator of Maven, an open source application for managing application development projects, would argue that not nearly enough time and energy is focused on making developers productive as quickly as possible.

At the EclipseCon 2010 conference today, Sonatype will announce Sonatype Maven for Eclipse, which brings its project management application for developers to users of the Eclipse-based application development tools.

Van Zyl says that most IT organizations lack a structured way for seamlessly integrating new developers into an existing project. That missing capability means that it takes a lot longer to bring a new developer up to speed on any given project. With Maven, the process is greatly reduced because everything needed to bring a new developer up to speed on any given project is only a URL click away.

Application lifecycle management (ALM), says Van Zyl, is still an important process, but the tactical considerations of managing the developers themselves is frequently overlooked. In fact, Van Zyl says that one way to think of Maven is as the missing project management front end to many ALM offerings that are already on the market.

The challenge, he says, is really bridging the divide between the way we manage applications and the developers that actually create them.