Software knowledge for developers and maintainers
How would you present DECODER?
DECODER aims at solving a problem that exists with all legacy software: trying to understand the code. It’s a problem I personally experienced first hand. For some time I have been working on open source software that was community-supported, assembling open source components in solution platforms and improving them on the way. I had to understand this software in depth and it was time consuming because they usually had no real professional attributes. It is always difficult to get into a software that has been developed by somebody else. It is a problem we talk a lot among developers: having to dig into a software we haven’t developed. This is where DECODER intends to help. DECODER provides information about software. With DECODER, the developer has a better view of the project and gets this knowledge faster.
What is your role in the project?
Capgemini has several roles in the project. The first one is to provide a use case to the researchers that create DECODER. In particular we will concentrate on improving the documentation. It is important that the documentation can be shared and is easily accessible. Capgemini has an extensive experience in developing documentation and we will provide guidance so the project manages its documentation at a professional level of expectations i.e. according to our best practices and state of the art. The second role, somehow related to the first one, is to develop DECODER's user interface. We must create something that is useful for the developer or the maintainer of a software project, i.e. something visual and intuitive. The user interface must enable the user to efficiently derive the maximum information from the DECODER's back-end.
What key innovation do you bring or help to develop?
The key innovation for us is to ensure the industrialization of a research project. Our objective is to help bring this project to the market. We have thousands of potential users in our company. We will leverage our own internal market to help make DECODER more mature. Capgemini’s main difference with the research organisations that participate in the project is that we are more focused on what the end-users want. While research essentially concentrates on developing breakthrough technologies, we concentrate on using cutting-edge technologies with real-life users: we have to think of the customers and provide them with proven and sustainable solutions.
A word about yourself and your organization
I started my carrier 15 years ago as a computer science researcher and I became a software engineer. I have focused on healthcare solutions, Java, databases, reporting, etc. Now, I am an architect in the “agile” unit in Valencia. This unit is 100-person strong, its role is to support agile methodologies throughout Capgemini in Europe.