ICSE - Day 1

I’m at the ICSE 2007 this week and attempting to discover how to put more science into what I consider to be a mostly artistic and political process called leveraging technology to solve business problems.
For the record this is the first conference since PDC 2005 where I’ve felt like I could really geek out. I’m attending this conference to see if I can learn from the software engineering discipline. What I’m discovering is that the discipline is present in things like aerospace, and there are some truly innovative DSL tools around factory automation, but in general and too my delight I’m finding an artistic side to this discipline. I’m also running into a lot of that “It depends” nonsense. I’m seeking answers not ideas!

Here are a few statements I heard and my reaction:
1. Software is like paint – It’s not about the paint, it’s about what you do with it. Some comments were around educational systems trying to face the challenge of educating software engineers in the art of painting compliers but when they go out into the word and look for a job, the industry is asking for a couple of complier painters, but a bunch of business application painters, etc.

2. “We lose 40% of our software engineering freshman because we try force they way they program” I was in a presentation today that focused around whether or not you should require parameters in the constructor or use the create-set-call pattern. I hope I got that right. They discussed three of the personas that Microsoft uses. I’m not sure what the percentage of each persona is, but I do know that of the programmers I’ve worked with, I can say that programmers work with their own habits, and in their own way. Having only one way of teaching didn’t work for me and I dropped out of my first Fortran class as soon as I found how to register.

3. “How did you become a good architect” – I worked with a few good architects.

4. SaaS is here to deliver the same ease of use functionality you get from Yahoo or Google and bring it to the enterprise space. – As I think about this I’m considering our current decisions around SalesForce.com and Microsoft CRM. I’m torn. On one hand I see a team of developers who know .NET technology, a BA group set on gathering requirements, and a QA group set on testing the changes. It’s how we are growing up and it’s for all the right reasons. I think that once we will go with Microsoft CRM for now but our next round might be with SalesForce.com. I’m thinking that the amount of control our organization would need to give up would not fly with all of the other organizational changes we have going on right now. From a software engineering perspective we would need to expose our internal data externally over secure web services and call to them from SFA.com. This is all very possible, but first we might have to implement something locally like Dynamics CRM, get our web services setup internally, and then migrate over to SFA.com once they get a little better and we get a little smarter. I really like the idea of running on the SFA platform, but I’m not sure I want to introduce SFA programming into our organization right now.

5. Barry Boehem is the reason it took so long for Agile to come about. He published a study that said it was very expensive to fix something in production and very cheap to fix it in design. – Barry commented on this and agreed. He also commented that it depends. The research he did and the data gathered applied to systems where the data could be collected. As soon as you introduce people into the process, how do you accurately gather requirements? Perhaps the principles behind Agile methodologies apply to more people intensive processes. Barry seems like a great guy.

6. Figure out when you should catch defects, classify your testing types and when you find a defect determine whether or not you should have caught it earlier or if you caught it in the right spot. – This is an interesting one. I’m curious to see how we tackle this. When a defect happens in production, we ask the question “Should we have caught this earlier, or is this the right place to catch them?”