Cape of Good Code

Business value

That software innovation is a key element for Cape of Good Code goes without saying. “We have to stay ahead of the curve. After all, ‘software is eating the world’ to quote Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape). We eat our own dog food, actually; we apply our DETANGLE® Analysis Suite in our own development. DETANGLE® integrates different data sources, from requirements engineering to design and implementation like code repositories, the history of the code, even to DevOps processes. In fact, we have to integrate any kind of development methodologies, technical methodologies and technical tools used during software development in order to do the business intelligence for software engineering.”

Furthermore, Egon mentions that Cape of Good Code is going even further in the meantime and is starting to apply artificial intelligence with the upcoming DETANGLE® Refactoring Assistant complementing the Analysis Suite: “We do not do it for the sake of using artificial intelligence; we always need to figure out the value and the business value of applying it. And that’s the general point. You have to figure out the business value behind some digital services that go beyond remote maintenance that has been done for decades, for instance. In the meantime, I have seen several medium-sized companies establishing digital ecosystems platforms to integrate not only their customers, but also partially other industry partners and competitors. Look at Siemens. It wants to become the Industry Metaverse (simulation and digital twins of industry plants). This is the next kind of innovation that’s already taking place.”

Co-creation

Egon would like to see industry in Europe becoming partners and creating digital platforms and ecosystems, and also sees a more entrepreneurial role for academia. Funding can expedite this. “Funding initiatives can bring academia and industry together to exchange ideas to work on research and development,” so Egon proposes “getting industry partners and academia to become business partners, even creating digital platforms and ecosystems together to build, for instance, a multimobility management platform, where the billing, routing and journey recommendations are in one place. Technically, it’s feasible. The main obstacle is the willingness to share.” That willingness to share is what Egon found in ITEA where he first became involved when at Siemens.

Open-minded and collaborative

Christoph Niedermeier, who is still at Siemens, introduced Egon to the ITEA BaaS project led by Franz-Josef Stewing of Materna. “Christoph was the technical coordinator of the consortium. In close collaboration with him I was heavily involved in conceiving, designing and coordinating the effort of many partners in implementing the innovative Building as a Service concepts and software architecture we had in mind,” Egon explains. “That’s why I have a good memory of that project and it’s also how we came to be involved in the ITEA SmartDelta project.” SmartDelta aimed to accurately analyse and determine the quality implications of each change and increment to a system. “We actually just joined one year ago. We benefit in many ways from this participation because we cooperate with academia to get some new ideas and product features. We also have a big opportunity there to promote our DETANGLE Shield to the industrial partners, who may be potential customers later on. In fact, our ‘new’ industrial partners also request new features that we were actually implementing as part of the project, validating and prototyping them, and hopefully getting into the product itself to sell later on. So, it really pays off in terms of knowledge and business networking.” This productive experience is likely to spur Egon to do something similar in the future. “Not only was it open-minded and collaborative but it also generated results that the industrial partners can exploit. So, yes, I can definitely say we will participate again in the future.”

More information:
https://capeofgoodcode.com