Source: iPon, http://ipon.hu, August 13th, 2009

A European research team is developing a means of automating various stages and steps within both the traditional programming cycle and within testing procedures. This will help software developers to complete tasks more easily, more quickly and more cheaply. The team is not giving away detail as yet but they have announced that their creation has been christened “ETICS”

“It’s a system which can do much of the routine work on its own and this is something which programmers really need in their daily 9 to 5.” The system is based around broad-scale software “Gridding” in which elements of the various project tasks are literally shared out between a number of individual PCs. This also means that the number of platforms that the project may need to run on can be maximized.

In addition to this, the system runs on open-source code enabling anyone to improve easily upon existing code and/or adapt the whole to suit any specific requirement, as required. Not only will the user interface be simple but through it the various programming changes and testing procedures can be monitored and amended over the web at any time, meta-data can be updated within the software and that software can then be amalgamated easily with carefully selected web applications while development work is still underway, without any disruption to the process at all.

And the team is not finished yet (They now have ETICS-2 approaching readiness). Based on the feedback they are getting they are fine-tuning ETICS all the time in the hope that the finished product will eclipse the best of the rest in the market (i.e. systems for both testers and IT managers). It will be interesting to see how impressive the final product turns out to be.