Software Development is dying because Software Development has failed to build the tools necessary to work at level 3 or level 4. Therefore when people and employers start thinking about working with information, they think of BI tools, data mining, reports, and big data. None of these are software development and all of these are an approach to filling the need for information.

Our job is to create the tools and the framework necessary for software development to tackle the problem of working with information. Now information and data are two different things. Data is numbers, names and dates etc. Information is numbers names and dates that have meaning. Current software development tools can work with data effectively, and convert data into ad hoc hard coded user interfaces that present it as information, and can place hard coded ad hoc context around the data in the form of xml, object oriented classes, hierarchies, JSON, and relational database tables.

Our job is to create a framework that will allow software developers to process the context itself in a non-literal systematic way. So the equivalent of members of objects, object hierarchies, tables, relations, columns and tags can all be processed, worked with and integrated. I am doing this by characterizing data with endemes in a technique that I call data semantics. This will allow software development to move into Level 3. Then I will characterize organization schemes using endemes and data semantics. This will allow software development to move into Level 4. Data semantics is a process of identifying the context of a piece of data by building an endeme set that can be used to characterize its meaning at a low level of the OO class hierarchy. i.e. simple (leaflike) members.

This should turn software development around and bring it into the information age. Software developers will be able to out-compete the data miners by providing a follow-on step covering not only the mining of data but the storage and further processing of the information once it has been mined out of the raw data. Software developers will be able to out-compete the report writers by crating reports that respond to user needs and that can be extended and modified as desired, that can be built using more natural langauge like requests and that will have an internal tendency to focus on (and tend toward) what user’s real and changing needs are. Software development will also be able to provide more powerful BI algorithms, and will entice BI people into software development, as BI people will be able to ask better, more powerful, and more usable questions of their technical data by writing programs to do this. In addition, BI will benefit by having a longer and more useful workflow, in that their results will not just sit in a report, but will be usable in further studies and analyses.

This is how we intend to turn software development around.