Year end budget - what development software should be considered?

Question

My department, and I assume many others, have an unusual year end problem: they haven't consumed all their budget. If they don't spend it all, then next year the budget will be reduced.

We've recommended numerous small pieces of software, but they've been rejected as "too inexpensive - we need to buy software development tools that cost thousands of dollars per seat!"

• What software development tools (or kind of software development tools) are on your 'wish list' - ie, you can't justify the cost, but you would be able to put to good use if you had them.
• I'm particularly interested in those tools that are stratospheric in terms of cost - you would never be able to justify them for any given project, but can be extraordinarily useful for most development work.

In my case I'd be targeting C code for high reliability use, and .NET tools for in-house use, but please contribute tools for all areas of software development.

One tool per answer, please don't duplicate, and explain what the tool does, what applications/platforms/languages/frameworks/etc it applies to.

Answer 1

"I'm particularly interested in those tools that are stratospheric in terms of cost..."

Hire a consultant to develop some "tools." Better yet, become that consultant. ;)

Answer 2

Expensive tools, maybe useful for software development. Never tried them, too expensive.

1. Perforce version control.
2. AlienBrain version control.
3. Axure wireframing tool.

Answer 3

Autocad certainly costs a bundle, Adobe CSn as well. I'd go with hardware though, if possible. Buying nice chairs, dual monitors, good machines if they don't have them already, good keyboards will definitely make your guys happy.

Answer 4

I certainly can't agree with spending money just because it is there, but...

A product that we have evaluated a few times, but could never justify the cost of is the HP LoadRunner tool. It has been a couple of years but you could really spend as much as you want on this tool.

A great tool to test scalability of applications. Just during a POC we were able to track down multiple potential issues in applications that had yet to fail.

https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms%5Fcontent.jsp?zn=bto&cp=1-11-126-17%5E8%5F4000%5F100%5F%5F

Answer 5

Xoreax Incredibuild. It's reasonably expensive and will lower your build times and, more importantly, number of mental context switches.

Answer 6

Get an MSDN subscription. The Visual Studio Team System has always been out of reach for my budget. Lots of good tools but can't justify the cost of the Team System. Have a look here. Plus, you have to renew every year so you won't have this problem again next year.

Answer 7

JetBrains Resharper - I've used the trial and loved it. Not hugely expensive though

UPDATE: A few months later, and I've bought it.

Answer 8

Red Gate's .NET Developer Bundle - includes performance & memory profilers, plus exception hunter for your .NET developers.

Load testing (like Load Runner) didn't make my budget as they were too expensive, in both licensing costs and labor for script-maintenance.

Answer 9

Araxis Merge - it's the only merge program I've used that I find trustworthy and easy to use. It's unfortunately also 5-10 times more expensive than all the other options.

Answer 10

Xenocode Postbuild - converts .NET applications to native binaries that run without the .NET Framework by linking all application components into a single EXE - starting at $1599 per seat.

Answer 11

PhotoShop. I've always muddled through with Paint.NET. Being a coder, it's harder to justify graphics software.

Answer 12

VMWare Workstation. Apparently the best virtualization software, where VirtualBox is free.

Answer 13

Beyond Compare. Really not expensive, but super useful for deploying, merging, anything.

Answer 14

Not really a development tool, but a second monitor and the graphic card to support it (if your workstations are not dual). IMHO access to a second monitor has a huge impact on productivity.

Answer 15

Buy a sexy diagramming API from yWorks and work diagrams into random applications (it's what I did). The API is like ~$10,000 USD bare minimum.

Answer 16

ERWin, for data modeling and architecture. It's expensive and it's been around for years, but it's still top of the line and works with just about every RDBMS out there.

Answer 17

The Red Gate SQL Bundle... Sql Compare is magical.

Answer 18

DBArtisan from Embarcadero, if your developers need a general-purpose tool for manipulating both data and data definitions; especially if your company deals with multiple RDBMS.

Though personally, I prefer working with tools provided-for by vendors (for commercial RDBMS, anyway).

Answer 19

For about $600 a seat, you can buy Structure 101: it will give you very quickly a very nice view of your architecture. Priceless when you have to modularize an application.

BTW, if someone knows a good Open Source alternative, I'm all ears.

Answer 20

You said C code and .Net, but if you're looking to spend money, web application security testing tools certainly fit the bill!

For example: IBM Rational AppScan can cost > $20,000 if you buy the right version!

I've had to work through the output of this app before to fix some issues, it was useful, but I don't have your problem and therefore cannot afford it.

Answer 21

NDepend, "a tool that simplifies managing a complex .NET code base. Architects and developers can analyze code structure, specify design rules, plan massive refactoring, do effective code reviews and master evolution by comparing different versions of the code." The cost is not "stratospheric", but it's not negligible either.

Answer 22

Typemock Isolator, the rolls-royce of Mocking frameworks.

Answer 23

Joel would want you to buy FogBugz. It starts at $999 to run it on your own server.

Answer 24

Sparx Enterprise Architect and Visio Professional for architectural and design docs. I find them absolutely essential.
XMLSpy enterprise edition if you are heavily into XML.
One tool I had a demo and looked impressively capable for for WCF testing is Parasoft SOA Test. But it is very expensive and the free SOAPUI tool is good enough.

I also had a roadshow demo on Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate edition 2 days back and you may have a look at that as well. Looks quite revolutionary with complete integration between requirements, design, development, version control, test planning and project management.

Answer 25

Wikipedia is free and contains a wealth of knowledge for programmers. So why not make a donation to Wikipedia.

Answer 26

A static C code analyzer like Astrée.

Answer 27

The Totalview Debugger is quite expensive and extremely helpful in my field (scientific high-performance computing). Its parallel debugging capabilities have saved me lots of time & frustration!

Since you asked for a description of what each tool does, I shamelessly stole this from the Wikipedia TotalView page

TotalView is a proprietary debugger for C/C++ and Fortran code that runs on Unix-like and Mac OS X systems, on several platforms.

It allows process control down to the single thread, the ability to look at data for a single thread or all threads at the same time, and the ability to synchronize threads through breakpoints. TotalView integrates memory leak detection and other heap memory debugging features. Data analysis features help find anomalies and problems in the target program's data, and the combination of visualization and evaluation points lets the user watch data change as the program executes. TotalView includes the ability to test fixes while debugging. It supports parallel programming including Message Passing Interface (MPI) and OpenMP.

I would strongly urge you to get an evaluation/demo license to try before you buy.

Answer 28

For number crunching, MATLAB is a good tool to have in your tool set, if you do that sort of things (scientific computing, numerical analysis, matrix manipulations, statistical analysis...) and it's insanely expensive once you start adding toolboxes.

Mathematica is also very nice for equation solving and symbolic math. For the kind of scientific work I do, it's not a must but it's a good investment, in that it can save me hours of work instantaneously.

Answer 29

A little late to the game here, especially considering the "year end budget" part of the question :-/

I'd be surprised if you weren't already using it for your C development, but just in case: Gimpel's PC-Lint would be a good, economical static analysis tool. (I know economical wasn't necessarily a requirement...)