English

29th Int. Conference on Software Engineering® 20 - 26 May 2007

Food for Thought

Retrospectives on Peopleware
Time: Wednesday May 23 @ 12.30PM, Venue: Salon D

 

Panelists
Steven Fraser (moderator), QUALCOMM
Barry Boehm, Director, USC Center for Software Engineering
Fred Brooks Jr., Kenan Professor, Dept of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Tom DeMarco, Atlantic Systems Guild
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild
Linda Rising, Independent Consultant
Ed Yourdon, NODRUOY Inc.

 

Description
Since its publication twenty years ago “Peopleware Productive Projects and Teams” (Dorset House, 1987) by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister has enlightened software professionals and non-professionals alike. Peopleware introduced among other topics - team jell, design patterns, and the “Furniture Police” - to the software engineering community and suggested that “sociology matters more than technology or even money”. Plan to attend this unique session with the pioneers of our profession to learn, reflect, and share experiences - looking forward to the future.

 

Agile Contracts
Time: Thursday May 24 @ 12.30PM, Venue: Salons A and B

 

Speaker: Mary Poppendieck

 

Description
In the mid 1980’s Toyota came to the US and showed Detroit how to work with suppliers on a win-win basis. In just five years, Toyota was the most trusted automaker among all automotive suppliers, had the lowest procurement costs, and the highest contribution of innovation from supplier companies. What does Toyota know about working with contracts that we can learn? For starters, they know that trust lies in specific actions, not interpersonal relationships. They understand the ‘game’ of contracting, and know how to structure relationships so both sides are motivated to contribute to the common good. There’s much we can learn from Toyota about how to change the contracting game in software development for the benefit of both parties..

 

Modeling for Maintainability
Time: Friday May 25 @ 12.30PM, Venue: Salons A and B

 

Speaker: Andrew Watson, OMG

 

Description
Software maintenance is the Cinderella of Software Engineering. The cost of creating a long-lived application is dwarfed by the cost of maintaining, updating and porting it over a lifetime sometimes measured in decades, yet few software engineers plan for maintainability. The only alternative to maintenance is to routinely re-implement working systems to a revised specification, but this is an even more expensive proposition. In fact, as the deployed software base continues to grow, we may already have reached the point where it's economically impossible to replace working applications, and there's no alternative to maintaining them. Fortunately,recent studies show that model-driven development methods (such as OMG's Model Driven Architecture) not only help develop quality applications quickly and cheaply in the first place, but also yield dramatic savings in the time and effort needed to maintain them. Use of model-driven techniques may literally be the only way businesses can afford to keep their software infrastructure running over the next few decades.