Having been a part of the software industry in the last 2 years, I could not help noticing a radical change thats taking place in the industry. The pronounced impact of this change is on the developers and those that are still playing technically inclined and find themselves in the software services industry.
Gone are the days when an Architect was required to have an understanding of all the technologies involved and the developer needing to be skilled enough to deliver the solution. We are walking into the SOA age and developers are working on very high level languages.
Some of the tools that i have had a chance to work on like TIBCO BW, SAP XI or an Oracle BPEL PM and many more on the same lines like Savvion, Pega, Fuego, Staffware etc that are in the market, provide you with GUI's and require you to just drag and drop images and build entire flows.
With SOA coming into the picture and each application / end point being exposed as a web service, enterprise integration is just a matter of dragging and dropping a sequence of activities in the right order. What would normally take a design phase and almost 10 days of development can now be completed within 30 minutes. Ofcourse this is not to say these products are perfect and do not introduce any bugs, but what they have achieved is the ability to produce mass software within no time.
This has helped software service providers to set up a software development production line where you can deploy a huge number of resources and can still develop exactly the same quality of software rapidly.
Will knowledge still have a say in the years to come? Or will it just be a software production line with yet another 'resource' being required to meet deadlines.
If the count is all that is going to matter, India and China certainly have a lot to look forward to.
