Archive for the ‘by Aldo’ Category

Metamorphosis

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Aldo, Andy, and I have just co-authored an article entitled “Metamorphosis: Adapting rapidly to change using the IDEAL improvement model” for the Q2 2009 issue of the ABB Review journal. Here’s the abstract:

Corporations must adapt rapidly to changing markets and adopt new technologies to remain competitive. Such adaptations are particularly important in a rapidly changing economic climate. Flexibility and a willingness to change are important qualities that must be fostered and encouraged, at all levels, if businesses are to respond effectively to shifts in product demands or to altered customer requirements. To encourage a positive environment for such change, the process for change must be carefully planned, well managed, properly justified and applied with sensitivity. ABB uses the IDEALSM 1.0 model as a framework to guide improvement processes so that effective changes are deployed efficiently.

The article discusses use of IDEAL for both process improvements, such as within the CMMI framework, and technology improvements guided by architecture evaluation methods such as AHEAD. We hope you enjoy it – comments welcome here, or on twitter @agile_teams!

moving AHEAD

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Our recent work with developing and applying AHEAD, which blends requirements engineering, AHP, architecture analysis, and prototyping for software technology evaluations, has been well received. Since the QFD Symposium, we’ve had papers on different aspects of the AHEAD method accepted by IASTED, SEPG, SAC, and SATURN! These AHEAD papers will be made available, subject to the conference publishers’ permission policies, after the conferences.

We also set a new personal-best record for accepted papers at the CMMI Technology Conference: seven! The papers include lessons learned from geographically distributed appraisals and innovative approaches to economic valuation of SPI activities. PDFs are now available online at the NDIA site and via our 2008 CMMI Technology conference page.

(Conferences page has been updated – Publications page, by date, will follow soonis now up to date too.)

We’ve also recently vetted our 2009 RE (requirements engineering) research roadmap with management, and are diving into some exciting new areas of work – stay tuned 🙂 Also mulling whether to submit papers for RE2009 and/or Agile 2009

getting AHEAD

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

In conjunction with our colleague Elizabeth, Aldo, Qingfeng, and I have recently completed several new papers on the AHEAD method which emerged from a recent software technology evaluation project. AHEAD stands for Attribute Hierarchy-based Evaluation of Architectural Designs; the method blends the SEI’s Attribute-Driven Design (ADD) with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to deliver a nice balance between efficiency and accuracy (agility and discipline) in performing objective software technology evaluations. Our research results are just now ‘hitting the press’ … the first paper was well received at the QFD Symposium last week, and two others have been accepted at conferences and will be presented in March. Please check out AHEAD – we’d love to hear your comments and suggestions for improving and applying it!

congratulations, Aldo!

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

I’m so pleased to be able to announce that Aldo Dagnino has been selected as the 2008 winner of the SEI Outstanding Contributor Award, which was presented to him at SEPG 2008 in Tampa, Florida last week. Aldo has consistently published and presented on business-driven process improvement and blending the CMMI with agile methods. Most recently, a paper on which he was the lead author comparing Scrum and the project management process areas of CMMI won ‘Best Paper’ in its track (for Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile) at the CMMI Users Group Conference in November 2007. Kudos to Aldo on this well-deserved recognition!