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Video: iRise Rising With 'Look Before You Code' Visualization Tool

Does writing software have to be an uncomfortable duel between the people driving the spec, who never seem to get what they want when the code comes back, and developers who lament the ambiguous instructions they've been given? Not if you can see what your app is going to look like first. That’s the idea behind iRise and its business visualization software. Check out my video chat with Emmet Keeffe, CEO of iRise, who explains it all.

The big win with iRise’s approach is that it in effect lets verify your interface meets requirements, and that users are going to be happy (or as happy as users can ever be) before you’ve written any code. "What usually happens at the end of every IT project is, the business people get their hands on it and say, 'That’s really not what I was hoping for,' which causes a lot of rework," explains Keeffe.

So iRise, available in a bunch of SKUs, including a single-user, an enterprise edition, and an SAP version, bypasses that problem to a large extent.

I was very interested to talk to Emmett, because I spent a lot of time in the 1980s and ‘90s (I’m showing my age here) covering supercomputing. In that arena -- which is now called “high-performance computing,” in politically correct technical parlance -- scientific visualization was a very big part of the equation. This is the graphics-on-steroids stuff which enabled researchers to search for oil deposits, examine aerodynamic air flows (computational fluid dynamics), and study a beating heart (PET scans).

"We’re basically bringing the concept of visualization to business software," explains Keeffe. "You can almost think of it as computer-aided design for business software."

Indeed, what better use of visualization than to apply it to the tough task of trying to get your app right prior to throwing it over the wall to IT? You can get the look of your app down in iRise and then in effect use that as a spec, so that what you want is what you end up getting coded up. Very cool.

"Not only are you able to get projects done faster, but you can cancel the bad ideas sooner," says Keeffe.

So this could be a paradigm shift in the making here, where developers eventually throw their HTML wireframes and Powerpoints into the dumper, and get down with the new way to prototype prior to coding.

Anyway, so check out my video discussion with Emmett; we chatted at the recent InformationWeek 500 conference.

Can iRise's approach help you? Leave a comment below, or shoot me an e-mail directly at alex@alexwolfe.net.

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