day 2 at ICGSE 2010

ICGSE 2010 will open today with a keynote by Len Bass of the SEI architecture team, titled “Speculation on Coordination Models”, and will close with a technology panel including Len on “Impact of Future Communication Technology on GSD”. I’m definitely looking forward to both.

In between, the schedule holds a single track of sessions on:

• Tools I: Support and Use
• Processes and Practices
• Management Environments I

Yesterday afternoon’s agile GSD tutorial was interesting and offered a nice preview of Erran Carmel’s forthcoming book, as well as a review of Yael Dubinsky’s HOT framework (humans, organizations, technology). However, I was a little disappointed that more time wasn’t spent on the GSD challenges of implementing specific agile practices. (It could have easily been a full-day session.)

While waiting for the keynote session to start, I enjoyed a good chat with Darja Smite of BTH, who gave yesterday’s REMIDI talk. It turns out that we have similar views on measurement in GSD, as well as knowing some mutual friends/colleagues in Sweden!

plans for day one at ICGSE 2010

Looking forward to a full schedule at ICGSE 2010 today:
* 90-min REMIDI workshop (Tool Support Development and Management in Distributed Projects)
* the first part of the PARIS workshop (Methods and Tools for Project/Architecture/Risk Management in Globally Distributed Software Development Projects)
* after lunch, a half-day tutorial on “Implementing Agile Software Development Across Time Zones”.
The conference also includes a full-day tutorial on “Requirements Engineering for Large Systems-Processes and Tooling”, a doctoral symposium, a half-day session on “What Did You Say? Cultural Influences on Communication and Understanding”, and the KNOWING’10 workshop on knowledge management in GSD.

I chatted briefly with one of the organizers at registration. Attendance for ICGSE 2010 is expected to be around 70 people, lower than usual, and about 70% university attendees, 30% industry. He attributed both the low attendance and the low industry percentage to the still-weak global economy: usually it’s over 100 people, and usually closer to 70% industry and 30% academic participation.

fun at SATURN 2010

I’ve been taking notes, getting good ideas, and collecting great insights for two solid days now at SATURN 2010. I have to call out one highlight: playing the Hard Choices game.

I’d looked forward to this COOL event since I first heard about it from game co-creator Rod Nord, and it didn’t disappoint. Getting to play the game with keynote speakers Jim Highsmith (his talk this morning on agility and architecture was excellent!) and Linda Rising (I’m looking forward to her talk tomorrow and her tutorial on Friday), and Marco of SEI, was great fun. The Hard Choices game is a useful metaphor for getting people to think and talk about software development strategies and tradeoff decisions, and I’m looking forward to trying it out ‘back home’ shortly.

You can check out the game at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/tools/hardchoices/!

SEPG NA 2010 wrap-up

Here’s the summary I promised on my experiences at SEPG North America 2010. Overall: great people and many good discussions on agile, CMMI, measurements, and practical real-world improvement.

Some related web references:

• A group of people (including @sepgconferences, @hi11e1, @cmmirox, @willjammer, @StagesProcess, @tcagley, @agilemanager, @srosemer, @dagreerdad, @spm221, @pdnielsen, and me-@agile_teams) tweeted during the conference using hashtag #SEPGNA. This was awesome; several times someone tweeted about the same session I was in, and I was able to arrange to meet the person F2F afterwards; when they were in different sessions, it gave me an idea of what they were hearing even though I could be in only one room.
• Several people (also including me) posted blogs here on WordPress using tag sepg-north-america-2010.
• The Week-at-a-Glance schedule has links to presenter bios.
• Presentations are now downloadable from the Session Catalog, but only by attendees (more on that later).

By the numbers (of course!): According to Anita Carleton at the Tuesday opening, nearly 800 people attended, of whom 250 were newbies, and 125 were from overseas (furthest: from Nanjing). One thing that was not clear: how many people actually attended all four days of the conference?

on requirements metrics

This morning I gave our SEPG NA 2010 presentation on requirements engineering metrics. It went well, and I got some great comments immediately afterward from some front-row participants, including one who said it was the most useful and practical presentation he’d heard all week! That made my day.

A PDF of the updated slides I delivered can be downloaded from the agileteams.com website publications area. Comments are welcome, here or on the agileteams blog or Twitter!

day one at SEPG

Today was a good start to my SEPG, thanks to a combination of good plans (well-executed) and serendipity.

arrival in Savannah

Today’s journey to Savannah for SEPG was rainy, but otherwise pleasant and uneventful. Things got a bit confused, though, on arrival at the hotel.

networking

In the interests of engaging with people where they already are: Agile Teams is now on Facebook. Please drop by to say hi when you’re in the virtual neighborhood!

refactoring

We’ve been running a self-hosted WordPress blog for quite a while now on agileteams.com. This one is being created to investigate possible migration of our blog home to wordpress.com, to:

• make it easier for more collaborators to join in the discussions, and
• reduce WP admin work for the volunteer webmistress (me)

Looking forward to chatting with you all!