Regional Architect Forum 2008 with Ivar Jacobson

On software development

The first paragraph of each description is the summary from the microsoft site. The remaining part summarizes the key ideas I took with me from this event.

Speakers

Ivar Jacobson

We have the great pleasure to invite you to the next Regional Architect Forum with Ivar Jacobson, as the “father of RUP” probably one of the most influential people in the field of software development processes. He will share his extensive practice-based experience with us. 

Additional Material:
Podcasts from Ivar Jabson and more
Agile Requirements with Use Cases

Roger Bösch

Roger Bösch will then take you through the Microsoft development process. 

Ronnie Sauermann

Ronnie Sauermann will introduce you to Cloud Computing a possible major and radical change in our industry.

Getting Good Software, Quickly and at Low Cost (Ivar Jacobson)

Good software can be described as extensible, usable and reliable. Quickly means that you have a good team of competent and motivated people. Low cost can be achieved by reusing components. Make software as simple as possible, BUT not simpler! The hype of CMMI is almost over, SCRUM is now the new fashion trend.
Getting good software quickly at low cost is what we all are striving for. The approaches to achieve this goal change over time. Some ideas have become main-stream and pushing them is like throwing in open doors. Use cases, architecture, components, iterations are great, but we also need to be agile. BUT, how do we integrate all these ideas into something useful that can help organizations to deliver good software, quickly and at low cost? The answer is Practices!

Documentation is important so that other people can take on your work BUT focus on the essentials. If you don’t document you don’t get promoted because nobody can take on your work . So what are the essentials:
- It’s less than a few percent of what experts know about these things
- It is placeholder for conversation

Nobody reads long documentations or process manuals. Document just the essential things, the things that are really important to understand the subject.

The new paradigm shift is from “Process is First Class Citizen” to “Practices are first Class Citizens”. For more information visit the website of Ivar Jacobson.

Software development process @ Microsoft’s Developer Division (Roger Boesch)

As one of the largest software development company worldwide, processes are also a very important topic at Microsoft itself. In the Developer Division, Microsoft uses a feature driven approach, where feature crews driving more then 1000 features from planning to the next release. Hear how we’ve implemented it on TFS, tracking progress and keep quality high in our own product: Visual Studio Team System.

For Microsoft delivering at time is most important because of the huge marketing campaigns behind the products. For measuring quality they have 16 quality gates to pass which are all automatic.
Features are developed is an isolated way. If they pass the quality gates they are merged into the main branch. Some amazing statistics about Team Foundation Server @ DevDiv (Sept. 2008):

- 370 Mio. Files for Version Control
- 490 000 work items (To Dos)
- 560 000 check ins
- 4500 registered Users

Cloud Computing (Ronnie Sauermann)

The coming shift to cloud computing could be a major change in our industry. As its name suggests, this kind of platform lets developers write applications that run in the cloud, or use services provided from the cloud, or both without requiring your own IT infrastructure. Microsoft is now starting to offer services in the cloud like Sql Server Data Services and Silverlight Streaming. The goal of this session is to explain what Cloud computing is, the impact that can have on how you build applications and demonstrate the current Microsoft offering in this space.

The CloudDB is NOT a hosted SQL Server or a typical relational DB but more a property bag. Cloud Computing means that you use a big infrastructure of somebody else and pay for what you use.

Steve Ballmer live in Zurich

Today I attended the “The global designer conference – Expression around the Clock” which takes place in 10 major cities worldwide (Auckland, Bangalore, Kairo, Mailand, Mexico City, Moskau, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Toronto) and luckily also in Zurich in the Swissotel. One can say that the event in Zurich was special compared to the other cities because the keynote speaker was Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

I didn’t know that Steve has swiss roots because his father actually hails from Biel and in the morning he got a honorary citizenship from Lausen

The keynote speech of Steve Ballmer started at 2:30 pm and was about 1 hour long. There was a live stream of the event available at the expression website and I hope there will be soon the recorded version of the speeches.

Steve focused on the user interface and the optimal combination of great design and great code. With the new technology “Silverlight”, Microsoft tries to combine the rich user experience of desktop applications with the broad accessibility of the internet. I like the comparison of the two “worlds” Internet vs. Desktop with the two words Reach vs. Rich. Unfortunately they go contrarily. The richer your application should be, the more you are dependent on local hardware and software installations and therefore you have a smaller reach.

After the keynote Sascha P. Corti and Stefano Mallè talked about “Next Generation Internet Website’s and Applications” and Sascha showed some Silverlight Demos in combination with Expression Blend. The key thing is that the design world and the developer world should work more together and Expression Blend is one tool which supports this in a great way.

Check out some amazing examples of Silverlight website’s (for a few examples you need the .net Framework 3.0 installed):

• British Library (Turning Pages 2.0)
• The New York Times Reader
• Popfly Overview
• Media Preview TV
• HSN Shopping TV

Steve Ballmer’s speaking style was very enthusiastic and entertaining and personally I think he was the best speaker this afternoon. The event was well organized by the internet-briefing club and I’m looking forward to the next interesting presentations.

Remix07 in Zurich – Day 2

 The next morning the keynote speech WPF and Silverlight: Creating designs that will Captivate not Intimidate users from Paul Dawson was really impressive. Paul talked about the new thinking of web content. People want to cut out the rubbish content during their web surfing which means that browsing via RSS feeds is getting more and more popular. Using RSS feeds for getting and overview is much more effective and has less “noise” of unwanted content. A nice way to look at this trend I think.

Also thinking about the following questions when starting a project may help to make the right decisions:

- What will people use ?
- What can we build ?
- What can the business support ?

Some interesting links from his talk:

Conchango.com 
kayak.com (great search engine for flights) 
systemone.at (great search engine: make a sketch to find similar pictures)

The next presentation Killer Digital Reading Experiences was also from Paul Dawson. He showed us new intelligent ways to read information on screens. Text flow and layout is dynamically adapting to the screen size. The New York Times uses this modern form of reading experience already.

The last talk and the second part of yesterdays “Thinking in CSS” was Web Standards and IE7 by Molly Holzschlag.

All in all these two days were very informative and well organized. I am looking forward to the Remix08 …

Read Part 1

Some useful links:

positioniseverything.net

quirksmode.org

gtalbot.com

designdetector.com

Remix07 in Zurich

We are looking back on two days of exciting talks about design and development issues in Zurich. The event was hosted by Microsoft but there were lot of presentations from other companies. The main topic was the new Silverlight technology and Visual Studio 2008, Codename “Orcas”.