General Management and Analysis Track 2008

10:00 AM

Encapsulated Process Objects™ Using Agile Methods and Object Orientation to Achieve Success with your Process Improvement Program

Jeff Dalton
President and CMMI Lead Appraiser – Broadsword Solutions Corporation

In an industry that is becoming progressively more competitive, the process used to develop systems and software is the last remaining area for competitive advantage. Similar technologies and skill sets are available in all corners of the world, but innovative and useful processes have eluded all but a handful of organizations.

With high-failure rates, over complicated and ill-deployed processes have soured the industry on process models such as CMMI, ITIL, ISO, and SPICE. But the success or failure doesn’t lie in the model, but in the interpretation and deployment of process based on the model, and this can make the difference between a vibrant and innovative company and one that is struggling for survival.

The application of object orientation and agile methods to the design and deployment of process is uncommon but is an effective and innovative solution to solving the high-failure rates experienced by too many companies. Jeff Dalton has authored a methodology with Encapsulated Process Objects at the heart of process design, using concepts and language familiar to engineers, and providing them with the ultimate flexibility and value as it applies to useful and usable processes.

Attendees will learn about a new way to address process design and deployment using the object oriented concepts of encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. Attendees will also learn how to manage their process program using agile methods based on time-boxed work-sessions, releases, and iterations.

10:50 AM

Best practices for Requirements Management – How Can I Get My Teams to Build the Right Solutions the First Time?

Lee Reid
Software Systems Architect – IBM Rational

We know from several studies that today, even with all the maturity we have with process and tooling for software engineers, we still see over half of the software projects for application development/delivery fail to meet their deadlines, exceed planned budgets, or be outright cancelled. Why is that? The root cause almost always comes down to problems with understanding and communicating requirements.

In this session attendees will learn about the value of properly collecting, organizing, and communicating requirements among their team members. In addition the topics of managing changing requirements and the automation of requirements management processes will be presented. When teams apply some or all of these best practices to their everyday projects there is usually an immediate positive impact. Learn how your team can organize their requirements so that a business analyst can more easily transform high level needs to functional and nonfunctional details. See how use cases are an effective way to represent functional requirements. Learn how teams use traceability to perform coverage and impact analysis. Understand how teams manage changing requirements and see how testers can effectively plan test cases based on well defined requirements.

12:40 PM

Software Excellence through Process Excellence

David Walker
President – David Walker SPCS, LLC
Immediate Past Chair of Software Division – American Society for Quality Software Engineering Institute
SEI Partner for CMMI Product Suite

Does your software organization have a “way of doing business”? Is it repeatable and reliable? Does this “way of doing business” serve you well? Does your “way of doing business” have any chance of getting better? Increasingly over the last 10 years, the “quick and cheap” business theme has influenced software organizations to lose focus on process. Agile has become popular because it is more “reactive” in nature than traditional development approaches. Is this what we want? Even Agile needs defined processes, right? J. Edwards Deming promised that if you establish your business process and trust it enough to follow it, you will produce good products. This presentation will highlight the need for standard processes with tailoring guidelines that fit your projects. These standard processes guide project management, engineering, support, and even process management activities. Using the CMMI-DEV has a reference, the presentation will promote proven approaches to getting started, getting good, and pursuing excellence with your software business process.

1:30 PM

Agile and the Beginner’s Mind

Lisamarie Babik
Evangelist in Residence – Menlo Innovations, LLC

Agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum can provide much needed structure to the software development process, but sometimes it can feel like you’re stuck in a rut. Iteration after iteration, another estimation, more planning, kickoffs, programming, retrospectives… The hard problems seem to get harder to solve, and sometimes even the simple things elude you.

While your XP team has been working together for a while, and the team members’ experience and education give them a rich body of knowledge, there may still be problems they have difficulty solving. It is here that a Buddhist concept known as “The Beginner’s Mind” can help. The Beginner’s Mind is a state of being where you approach learning with no judgment, censoring, editing or preconceived expectations.

Consider the following example: by continually pairing and re-pairing teams, there is always someone approaching a problem with a fresh perspective and without preconceived notions as to how to solve it. S/he brings a beginner’s mind to the problem, therefore previously excluded paths may be explored to find a solution.

This presentation will examine how one company uses Beginner’s Mind to tackle the everyday challenges that face their teams.

2:50 PM

Delivering Software Certainty

Shawn Crowley
Software Developer – Atomic Object

Clients are afraid that their project might go off the rails if they don’t bring back a fixed bid on cost and a guaranteed delivery date from the developers. Developers are afraid of making promises because they know that the project requirements will change. Consequently, projects are prone to kick off with a subtle, lurking, feeling of wariness and fear.

Developers and project managers often feel they are faced with a paradox when asked to scope and direct a project that is supposed to be agile. Agile projects are sometimes misunderstood to be open-ended, time-and-materials projects that are not to be bridled with upfront estimation and iterative reality checks against a target.

Experience has shown that there is value in recognizing the inherent conflict in providing accurate upfront estimates while allowing requirements to change. Trust and shared vision can be achieved by the client and developers collaboratively participating in a limited initial scoping process. Using the initial scope and vision as a beacon, a team can iteratively measure the project’s progress and collaborate with the client to steer the project in the most valuable direction.

Lessons learned from real projects – both successes and failures – will be shared. Usage of practices and tools for effective project management, including: feature specification, release planning, risk management, story point estimation, iterative reporting and iterative planning will be discussed.

3:40 PM

An Introduction to Open-Source Software

Eric Hartwell
School of IT Chair – ITT Technical Institute

This presentation serves as an introduction to what it means to utilize or build open-source software. The presentation will be a great start for those software developers and managers who need to understand what open source is about and how open source software relates to freeware. It will shed some light on the rumors that often limit the use of open source in industry. It will examine the pros and cons of open source development in a software project as well as licensing concerns. The presentation will discuss the difference between the use of open source software and creating open source software.