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Developing a Software Product Line Today's tools and techniques for software development tend to focus on individual products. However, customer demands require most companies to offer a software product line portfolio-a collection of related products with variations in features and functions-rather than just a single product. This situation has led to the emergence of development methods, tools, and techniques focused specifically on the challenges of software product line development. Charles Krueger explores this latest generation of software development methods that are yielding an order-of-magnitude improvement in time-to-market, engineering cost, product quality, and portfolio scalability. Charles shares the best methods from recent industry case studies, including model-driven, aspect-oriented, minimally-invasive, and agile strategies. Learn innovative, proven software product line development methods, as well as practical approaches for getting started.
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Charles Krueger, BigLever Software
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Better Software Conference 2007: Lightning Talks: A Potpourri of 5-Minute Presentations Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try conference speaking without the heavy commitment or attendant nerves. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to quickly present your single, biggest, bang-for-the-buck idea. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation. Use this as your opportunity to give a first time talk or to present a new topic for the first time.
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Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
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Continuous Integration to Improve Software Quality The practice of continuous integration facilitates early visibility into the development process by regularly incorporating new modules into the build much earlier than the classic "big bang" integration approach. Continuous integration helps reduce the time between when a defect is coded and when it is discovered, thereby making it faster and easier to repair. Software teams see their build process as much more than a simple compile and link process because the build exposes new bugs immediately. In addition, builds can be augmented with a set of "software inspectors" that report on aspects of software quality including code complexity, duplication, dependences, and adherence to standards. Andrew Glover describes the practice of continuous integration and the tools available for both Java and .NET platforms. Learn how to interpret the data provided by software inspectors and how to make improvement actions based on that data.
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Andrew Glover, Stelligent
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First to Market or First to Fail: A General Systems View Marketers often emphasize the enormous advantage of being first-to-market, but is being first really an advantage? Looking at some of the spectacular successes of products, brands, and technologies, you will see that, contrary to popular belief, so-called first-to-market products like Netscape Navigator, PalmPilot, and iPod were actually later arrivals that became more successful than the originals. Why did they succeed when their predecessors didn't, and why were they so widely perceived as revolutionary? Michael Bolton shows how general systems thinking can help us identify factors that govern the success or failure of an innovative product, service, or strategy. By taking a general systems view, you will understand that the notion of "first" depends on the features or attributes that we choose to observe or ignore.
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Michael Bolton, DevelopSense
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Building Better Teams through Better Interviewing As manager of a software team, you often rely on your staff for assistance when conducting technical interviews to fill positions in your organization. However, even the most technically competent people may not necessarily be good interviewers. Some reasons include lack of interest, thinking that they "can just tell" if a candidate is a good fit, or simply not knowing the fundamentals of interviewing. All these issues must be addressed to improve the interviewing skills of your staff. Michael Kahn discusses the direct and indirect costs of a bad hire and why your staff should take interviewing seriously. He focuses on pre-interview planning-what should be done beforehand to achieve a successful interview. Learn to design effective questions for assessing not only the technical skills of software professionals but also their ability to fit socially within your team.
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Michael Kahn, MK
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ITIL and You: The Perfect Match ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a flexible framework for implementing IT Service Management within an organization. Since its introduction in the 1990s, ITIL has mostly been applied within IT operations and excluded from software development; however, more and more IT departments are now asking development to join in. ITIL offers an extensive set of management procedures that are intended to support businesses in achieving higher value for their money and improving quality across the breadth of the IT infrastructure. Join Michael Giacometti to learn what ITIL is and why it is gaining in popularity. Find out how implementing ITIL processes can significantly improve both your time to market and the quality of your software. Michael explains what to do to gain better information about your development and new ways to control investments and quality.
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Michael Giacometti, Sungard
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Coaching: The New Leadership Imperative The days of plan-driven command-and-control technical management are gone. Flexible software development and the adoption of agile methods are driving factors. Add to this the fact that the I-decide-You-obey paradigm never worked very well anyway. Today, a coaching model is replacing command-and-control within more self-directed teams. This shift drastically changes the skills required of today's leaders, many of whom are struggling with questions such as: If I don't make the decisions, what is my job? Is my position really needed? Am I needed? How can I adapt? Robert Galen explores the key changes required to improve the coaching abilities of managers and project leaders. Taking lessons from agile methods, proven coaching models, and a few gratuitous sports analogies, Robert offers valuable advice for any leader looking to become a better coach who can enable the team to perform at the highest possible level.
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Robert Galen, RGCG, LLC
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Using Lean Thinking to Align People, Process, and Practices The operational structure of many organizations fails to support their software development teams. Continuously creating and reforming teams, isolating development from the organization, lack of participation by customers, and rapid task switching cause huge amounts of waste in development. Although agile development practices have made great strides in the last ten years, they have largely ignored the issue of the structure of the organization. "Lean Thinking" is the shorthand phrase for the paradigm, thought processes, and principles that Toyota follows in producing high quality cars at low cost-with a faster development cycle than their competitors. Software development is not exactly like manufacturing, but the principles of Lean Thinking-optimizing the whole, eliminating waste, and respecting people-apply equally well to software development.
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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Risk Management--It's Not Just For Gamblers Any More The difference between gamblers and many software managers is that gamblers know there is a good chance they will lose a bet. An intelligent blackjack player can expect to win 45-49 percent of the time; software project success rates have only recently passed the 33 percent mark. Payson Hall argues that a key to project success is improving our ability to identify and manage risks-technology risks, project risks, business risks, and more. Although risk management is an increasingly popular topic in the executive suite, talk alone does not mitigate software risks. Is risk management a fad or a discipline? How does risk affect real project outcomes? Is it worth the investment? What does effective risk management look like? Join Payson Hall as he presents practical strategies for identifying and managing real-world software risks. Learn to identify threats to your projects' success and practical strategies to mitigate those risks.
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Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
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What Better Software Means to the CEO Today's organizations depend on software applications for their business success-and survival. When applications fail, businesses are severely damaged-revenue losses in the millions, key data stolen, brands and reputations damaged. Security vulnerabilities impact consumer trust and result in violations of customer privacy or customer lawsuits. Often the root cause of these dire consequences is an information and communication gap between development and corporate management. Simply stated, business executives often do not know the first thing about how software is built, tested, or maintained. They often refuse to approve the time and resources necessary to ship a product with acceptable quality and security. Likewise, development teams often do not know the first thing about business and cannot adequately justify their needs to business.
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Jeffery Payne, Cigital, Inc.
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