IEEE news – Feb. 2010

February 5th, 2010

Feb. 16 IEEE Computer Society meeting, Eastern North Carolina Section: I’ve been invited to participate on a panel on “Practical Software Development” with two local luminaries: Andy Hunt (/\ndy) and Robert Galen.

People who RSVP can suggest specific questions they’d like us to tackle, and moderator John Baker promises to bring some additional ‘clever questions’ on balancing agility and discipline. If you’re in the Raleigh area, do plan to come by at 6pm for pizza and the lively discussions that are sure to ensue! IEEE Members and guests are welcome.

Where: Engineering Building I Room 1005 Centennial Campus NCSU
Map: http://www.ncsu.edu/campus_map/centennial.htm

RSVP to John Baker at jbaker (at) etechsuccess.com to confirm your attendance and suggest questions for the panel.

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upcoming events

February 5th, 2010

2010 has been super busy so far, and is off to a great start. In addition to a new IEEE Computer Society meeting panel invitation, and our previously accepted SEPG 2010 presentation on requirements engineering metrics, the Agile Teams collaborators now have a half-day tutorial accepted at SATURN. If you’re also attending SEPG or SATURN this year, please look for us and say hi!

Posted in ADD, AHEAD, architecture, by Karen, by Qingfeng, CMMi, conferences, events, methods, news, publications, requirements, SEI, technologies | Comments Closed

Windows 7 event recap

January 13th, 2010

I’ve been hearing rumbles about Windows 7 for quite a while, had just a bit of hands-on time with it on a colleague’s new laptop, and seen a mentally sticky Mac ad deriding Windows 7 as “waaay better than [ Vista | XP | NT | 3.1 ]”. This morning I attended my first big-picture presentation on Win7, a free event at the NCSU McKimmon Center (details here and here).

It was well attended, planned, and executed; other than a few A/V annoyances, my only quibble is that for future I’d suggest the organizers plan more lecture time for a more leisurely talking pace, and less Q&A time at the end. Presenter Tim Hodgkins, an Enterprise Technology Strategist from a nearby Microsoft office, is clearly experienced and knowledgeable, and he was refreshingly frank – kudos to him for a useful and entertaining talk that effectively addressed a diverse audience.

However, due at least in part to that diversity in interests of the audience, the topics covered weren’t nearly as tech-oriented as I had hoped. While it had been described by NCSU as a ‘business and technical’ talk, the slides actually covered were pretty light on ‘how’ details, and devoid of discussion on financial benefits. My first red flag that it might not be very geeky was the absence of a prominently-posted Twitter hashtag 😉  Then Tim asked the audience at the start whether they were consumer users or enterprise users, and unfortunately for me, the consumers were the vast majority. He then sensibly tailored his talk accordingly, but to address both segments in the two hour lecture time allotted (minus A/V adjustment time), he visibly skipped a bunch of enterprise-focused slides, and had to go pretty fast overall.

I tweeted only once, during a brief A/V break, and the rest of the time I took old-fashioned notes – impressions and reflections now summarized below, with a side note on Windows 7-based entertainment in a separate blog post. (Those of you who already have hands-on experience as Windows 7 users or from beta-testing for months may disagree or have further insights to offer; comments welcome!)

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Posted in events, technologies | 1 Comment »

that’s entertainment?

January 13th, 2010

Two observations on Microsoft’s recent ventures into modern entertainment, motivated by my attendance this morning at a Windows 7 event (“Windows 7 event recap” to follow shortly with a summary of the non-entertainment aspects):

First, is Netflix trying to take over the movie world by partnering with everyone?! Not satisfied with lightning-fast turnaround of physical discs via snail mail, and expanding the pool of supported blu-ray players with the PS3 disk they released in December, now they’re arm-in-arm with Microsoft with Windows 7.

Second, while “Internet TV” (prominently discussed in the Windows 7 event; just sign up here with your Live ID …) sounds cool, it loses much of its charm from two facts:

(1) opening commercials which the watcher must endure, and

(2) inability to record shows for later offline use, unless the content provider expressly allows it (the speaker indicated that probably most will not).

Conventional home-based TV viewers, whether advertisers like it or not, are accustomed to being able to use VCRs and DVRs to record shows and to skip commercials. An Internet substitute for conventional, cable, satellite, … TV that omits the big advantages of VCRs and DVRs isn’t likely to be very appealing to home-wired or mobile consumers.

At least with a Netflix membership, customers have the dual options of instant viewing OR getting a physical disc to watch when, where, and with how many ever interruptions they please – and that includes a lot of TV series, although not on as timely a basis as Internet TV could offer.

If they were to handle live streaming of sports events which are subject to regional blackouts, they might have a small hit on their hands, but only if they can avoid the ESPN 360 syndrome of cable Internet/DSL providers who don’t support the service (they won’t pay the fees ESPN asks, and block ESPN’s data streams as a result).

Until wireless becomes universally pervasive and free, along with sufficient or wireless power to sustain a portable computer with wireless on (which in my road experience is a battery-killer) for the duration of a TV show, there’s not much of a value proposition for people who want to entertain themselves during long offline periods. I’m not convinced that the newer smartmediaphones (eg iPhone 3GS) aren’t at least as good an alternative for bored road warriors.

Did I miss something? If so, kindly enlighten me!

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trying Toobla

December 12th, 2009

Recently I heard about Toobla and thought I’d give it a whirl. So far our new Agile Teams toobla library has only a few simple folders: one for agile, one for GSD (global software development) to organize our blogs, links, etc. Toobla CEO @blinkdaddy kindly sent me a suggestion to check out @bblanquera‘s very nice agile library in Toobla. I can definitely see Toobla’s value as a personal organizer (see their ’12 uses’ blog post for ideas), and I’ve now added Ben as a ‘friend’ on Toobla.

But how can I find agile libraries in Toobla by other cool people like Ben? I don’t see a search function on the site from my Toobla home page, and so far I am coming up empty with conventional web searches (try ‘toobla agile’ in your favorite engine – mine finds references to a few agile-inclined Toobla developers, Ben’s library, and mine). I am glad that they are adding support for more types of widgets (eg WordPress), and perhaps search goes a bit outside their core value proposition for visual aggregation and organization; nonetheless, at this point I’d have to say it’s my biggest wish.

Posted in agile, collaboration, tools | Comments Closed

Coping with Facebook’s Dec. 2009 privacy changes

December 11th, 2009

If you use Facebook, you’ve probably become aware of recent changes to their handling of privacy settings. The new ability to control privacy of each individual post you make is a good thing. But the consensus from most users and observers (including the EFF) is that, rather than improving privacy, all of the other changes create risks to most people’s privacy.

Below is a list of suggestions for how to exert as much control as you can and wish over your own FB profile. It’s a draft – comments, suggestions, and corrections welcome!
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Posted in privacy, security, tools | 2 Comments »

recent publications

November 5th, 2009

Our HAoSE 2009 paper and poster on “Measuring Collaboration in Globally Distributed Software Development Teams” was very well received. We also have had two new papers recently accepted for presentation:

Our Agile Teams publications and conferences pages are now updated to include these papers, as well as our 2009Q2 ABB Review journal article, “Metamorphosis“. (PDF copies of our published papers which are not linked to this site are available on request.)

Posted in by Karen, conferences, events, global, IDEAL, publications, requirements, SEI | 1 Comment »

smart(er) cities

October 5th, 2009

I’m in the process of digesting and summarizing my experiences at last week’s Smarter Cities NYC event and will be blogging a summary shortly; in the meantime, check out http://smarterplanet.tumblr.com and hashtag #smartercities.

Relatively unrelated to this event (I think), a new rating of the ‘smartest cities’ in the US was just published today. The top seven are:

#1:  Raleigh-Durham

#2: San Francisco – Oakland – San Jose

#3: Boston

#4: Minneaoplis – St. Paul

#5: Denver

#6: Hartford – New Haven

#7 (tie): Seattle-Tacoma

#7 (tie): Washington, DC

… read the rationales, and the rest, at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-04/americas-smartest-cities—from-first-to-worst/?cid=bs:archive9#gallery=787.

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architectural evaluation for usability

September 25th, 2009

Recently announced on the SATURN software architecture blog: A tool to support evaluating an architecture for usability, based on collaboration of ABB’s Pia Stoll with the SEI and Carnegie Mellon University. Their A-PLUS tool supports efficient evaluations of software architecture with respect to usability concerns, and is now available for download. Check it out!

Posted in architecture, news, SEI, tools | 2 Comments »

RE09 keynote on agile and requirements

September 2nd, 2009

Dave West gave the opening keynote speech today at RE09, titled “Delivering Business Value with Agile Approaches to Requirements”. The keynote description had definitely caught my attention, and I confirmed in a quick chat right before his talk that Dave was fresh from the Agile 2009 conference (he was sporting his Agile Alliance/Rally logo’d lanyard).

I took extensive notes on my laptop, but wasn’t able to ‘live blog’ – we’ve got free wireless, thanks to the conference organizers, but power connections are scarce. My battery’s not as good as it once was, and having the wireless on during the day today would have killed it. So I apologize for the delay in getting this post online, but hope you find it worth the wait!

In a nutshell, Dave delivered – he was entertaining and provided some hot-off-the-press stats on agile adoption. The only ‘promised’ topic which I didn’t feel was well addressed was how ‘formality and discipline play just as important role with Agile methods as with traditional approaches’, and it was a bit under the bar re ‘provide concrete recommendations on organizations can resolve the conflict and build a better requirements discipline’.  Everything else he covered was up to, or exceeded, my expectations. There were also some thoughtful questions from the RE09 audience in the limited time for Q&A.

Below are my detailed notes. Be advised that most of the percentages cited below are either subject to transcription errors, or were my approximations from reading column heights on a chart. Also, the bulleting is still a little rough/confusing, and I know I’ve used some personal abbreviations in here – with your permission and understanding, I’ll clean those up later.

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Posted in agile, conferences, events, requirements, scrum | 3 Comments »

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