The information technology nuts-and-bolts of the Internet, the bits and bytes, software and servers are relatively easy to get right, the real challenges are personal and cultural. Three significant characteristics have emerged during the Internet’s 25 year history. First, the Internet is a decentralising centrifugal force, second, it is a user-driven democratising force and third, it is a force for openness and transparency. These characteristics are inherent in the very structure of the switch packet topology that forms the intricate interconnectedness that is the Internet. They percolate up from the lowest level of routers and transmission protocols through various layers to seep out into wider society as a force for transformational change and personal empowerment.

Citizens and consumers alike increasingly expect autonomy, openness and transparency of information as well as fully digitised self-serve services with as many transactions conducted online as possible. This requires profound personal and cultural change for producers, service providers and consumers alike. For example, a new term, prosumer, is indicative of the trend towards consumers being able to participate in the creation of the products or services they consume. These characteristics will continue to define and influence our digital future in the coming decades.

Contrast this with the pre-digital industrial age where centripetal forces drew power, influence, command and control to the centre and required an extensive hierarchy of regimented managers and workers to get things done. Many of the colleagues and managers with whom I have worked over the last ten years remain wedded to a 20th (if not 19th) century centralised command and control management ethic.

Such individuals may conduct business on the Internet but are, at best, uncomfortable with or, at worst, ideologically opposed to what the Internet represents. The Internet augers a transformation that is fundamentally at odds with their ethos and personal approach at it challenges their personal preference for hierarchical command and control structures and processes. Seeing themselves as front and centre, they fail to think digitally enough to make the most of what the Internet has to offer. They have yet to make the necessary adjustments to network and collaborate rather than to own and dictate, to participate and share rather than command and control. The centripetal imperative of the 19th and 20th century is finally giving way to a 21st century centrifugal imperative and, in an era of digital transformation, making the necessary personal and cultural adjustments are prerequisites for success. The Internet is not just about technology, people and organisations have to change too.

Using collaborative technologies to connect people, and assist them in undertaking business transactions with payment portals and structured processes has inevitably reinforced the idea that you don’t need a middle man.'

Logan Hall of MoveBubble

The Internet is a disruptive technology melting and reforming business processes and value chains. The Internet makes things cheaper, more open and transparent. Cutting out the middle man it democratises and disintermediates. This has yet to happen fully in the UK property market but change is coming and innovative websites are emerging to challenge traditional high street estate agents.

The key to success will be providing a Facebook or LinkedIn for property, a virtual meeting place and market, a collaborative platform where sellers or landlords can list their properties and connect directly with prospective buyers and tenants. Such a website would be a facilitator rather than an estate agent. This would not be a free for all but a structured process guiding and prompting sellers and buyers, landlords and tenants through the process as well as providing access to property professionals and other services along the journey with case and account management tools and fulfillment and payment portals.

On such a site, a seller could list their property taking a DIY approach to the valuation, description, photos and videos or find and commission a local property expert (LPE) to assist. On the site there would be price comparison tools to find necessary services, to find LPEs, energy assessors to carry out an EPC, services or online tools to produce floor plans and obtain house signs etc. Sellers could manage their own viewing diaries or ask an LPE to do this for them. They could log on to review and manage offers. Buyers could make appointments to view properties direct with owners or LPEs and make offers online, access tools for mortgage advice and offers, conveyancers and payment transfer mechanisms. There would be price comparison tools, suggestions and prompts to find and commission surveyors for home buyers surveys or structural inspections and other services like removal firms, utilities, broadband, curtains and carpets - all services that are required in the course of house sale and purchase. The site would use a flexible pay-for-what-you-use pay-as-you-go fee structure rather than a flat fee or 1.5% of selling price model thus reducing costs substantially.

Many of the new entrants and websites in the property market, Local Surveyors Direct, Local Property Index, EasyProperty, PurpleBricks, CastleSmart, Veyo, Tepilo, MoveBubble provide parts of this puzzle, but there is no one website or vision putting the whole jigsaw together. The company that does so will likely win the race.

Many companies I have worked for recently don’t gain the full benefits of ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework and Agile. Let me explain.

MVC stands for Model-View-Controller and is an application architecture or design pattern that splits up an application into distinct layers known, unsurprisingly, as Models, Controllers and Views.

User interaction with an MVC application follows a natural cycle, wherein a user takes an action on a web page which launches an http request which is handled by a Controller and in response the application changes its Model, persists or updates some data in a database and then delivers an updated View via the Controller to the user via an HTTP response. This is a good fit for web applications using HTTP.

Most web applications combine HTML mark-up, client side scripts, server side executable code, domain classes, object relational mappers, databases etc. These map very well onto the MVC design pattern splitting the application up into discrete layers leading to a strict and beneficial separation of concerns.

This layering is based on a separation of responsibility where:

1. user interface issues are in the Views and nowhere else,
2. business entities and logic are in the Model and nowhere else,
3. transaction processing logic is in the Controllers and nowhere else,
4. data persistence is in data layer limited to this and nothing else.

As a result components in each layer are also loosely coupled. That is, each layer has a service interface to, but no tangible dependency on, its neighbouring layer. Each layer is essentially a black box that can be swapped out with a different implementation without breaking the overall application.

Compare this with the event driven SMART UI pattern behind ASP.NET Web and Win Forms development. Here there is no separation of concerns. Web and Win forms are relatively easy to write but difficult to read, maintain, extend and test. Due to the tightly coupled architecture testing become challenging, time consuming and resource heavy as source code grows overtime. Changes lead to frequent end-to-end regression testing of the entire application which is painful and costly.

MVC applications are more time consuming to write initially but they are more readable and easier to maintain and extend because of the loosely coupled architecture, tidier nature of the code, and a strict separation of concerns. This facilitates automated testing of layers interdependently of each other through use of fake or mock implementations of interfaces which simulate dependencies and provide predefined data sets and repeatable test scenarios. Automated testing in turn increases the tempo of testing and facilitates continuous integration and release of code changes in short iterations which fits well with Agile application lifecycle management methods.

Agile is essentially about running software development as a rapid and adaptable process of discovery and resisting the encumbrance and restrictions of excessive forwarded planning. It is about short iterations of development effort with frequent feedback and regular releases of small increments of business value to stakeholders usually at the end of fortnightly sprint cycles. The main effort is on domain driven development focusing on representing real world entities as objects in the Model and business logic as methods on those objects. Entity Framework is the glue that permits these objects and their state to be persisted in the database. MVC and Entity Framework goes hand-in-hand with Agile particularly where a separation of concerns permits automated testing and continuous integration.

The business and commercial benefits that flow from the ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework and Agile are:

• Clients get the right product because Agile encourages flexibility to change and the product is maintainable and extensible allowing requirements to emerge and evolve during development.
• Client gets a quality product as testing is incorporated throughout development and not just at the end of development.
• There is less development waste and rework as deviation and errors are identified early due to frequent product owner and client reviews and feedback thus reducing overall development costs.
• Active involvement of a user representative and/or product owner, together with high visibility of the product and progress, and flexibility to change when needed, creates much better business engagement and customer satisfaction and thus more positive and enduring working relationships.
• In terms of time, budget and scope, Agile helps to fix time and budget and vary scope. Flexibility on scope though, has to work both ways, and in a fixed time fixed cost project, the product owner or client must be prepared trade off items in the product backlog for any new items they wish to include.
• The incremental nature of Agile permits early implementation of some functionality while product development continues and this facilitates a phased revenue stream which helps to reduce commercial risk.

Unfortunately, in many projects, organisations choose to make use of pre-existing databases with stored procedures containing much of the business logic. This leads to  "an insufficient separation of concerns" between the domain Model and persistence layer. The lack of a distinct MVC Model and separate business logic layer reduces scope for automated testing and continuous integration and diminishes the business and commercial benefits that could be available.

Companies considering the use of ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework together with Agile for their future projects will benefit most on green field projects or on brown field projects where customers can be persuaded to adopt a big bang technology refresh and start from scratch. There is thus the opportunity to:

• abandon legacy data and technical debt,
• craft a discrete MVC Model and conduct domain driven development,
• use Entity Framework Code First to generate the database schema from the MVC model,
• adopt automated testing and continuous integration.

This helps development teams to fully embrace Agile to obtain the commercial and business benefits highlighted earlier in this article.