| Center for Software Engineering Presents
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Los Angeles
Software Process Improvement Network |
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Wednesday, October 27, 1999 6:30 P.M. – 9:30
P.M.
What’s happening in Europe? Vive la
différence!
Innovation and exploration – finding
new ways of solving commercial problems, and searching for new understandings
and ways of working. Refinement – taking established methods and finding
ways of making them work even better. Exploration – searching for new
ideas and ways of working. Technology Transfer – a spectrum of initiatives
to encourage best practice and broader awareness of new methods.
In the last 12 years the European Commission
has invested hundreds of millions in R&TD for IT. This is now starting to
have an effect in many fields. It has created a unique European way of working
together that exploits our cultural differences, and makes it easy to cooperate
across national boundaries.
The first presentation explains the context
of a changing Europe and how it impacts on Research and Technology Development
and on industrial practice in a number of areas relating to cost, quality and
risk. We then take the specific example of the Philotech Experience of using
COCOMO™ II model and developing a contrary view of` how to use it. This is followed,
or interrupted, by discussion of the broader implications of these activities.
Evolution, not Revolution
Commercial success in IT, and elsewhere, used
to be dependent on how efficiently money was used. Productivity and quality
improvement was the key to success. There is now increasingly rapid technological
change coming from the Internet and content providers, with new problems introduced
by increased integration between companies worldwide, and market needs that
can change dramatically within a year. In this environment, the efficiency with
which we use information can be much more important than incremental improvements
in production rate. For companies in such environments, it is no longer practical
to plan a revolution, and instead success depends on how quickly they adapt
to each new change of environment.
For some companies, this creates a demand for
process refinement without the use of process standardization and management.
Without the "software factory" paradigm, methods and tools are have
different importance and uses. For example, risk management and product quality
measurement become very important, broad training and awareness is needed by
staff using tools, and corporate knowledge needs to be stored in simple and
easily accessible ways. The second presentation introduces these issues, and
shows how model help with training, and how corporate knowledge can be accumulated
for models.
Adrian Cowderoy is a consultant
in risk management, quality profiling and sizing. He has chaired the European
Software Control and Metrics (ESCOM) conferences since 1996, has been involved
in numerous pan-European activities, and is an expert advisor to the European
Commission. He is the managing director of the Multimedia House of Quality (MMHQ),
and a visiting lecturer at City University in London. He was the project manager
of the European "MultiSpace" initiative, to apply engineering concepts
of quality to multimedia and Internet applications, and to learn from these
to improve software engineering. He created the Goal Risk Tool for coordinating
risk management activities between teams and sub-contractors in very large projects.
He has researched and written extensively on cost estimation and sizing.
Location: University of Southern California
- Information Sciences Institute
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11th Floor Conference Room
4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey CA
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6:30-7:00 Networking
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8:00-8:30 Break
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7:00-8:00 "What’s happening in Europe"
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8:30-9:30 "Evolution, not Revolution"
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No reservations required, free parking in nearby structure,
bring ticket to meeting for validation.
LaDonna Pierce, CSE Administrator, at (213) 740-5703 or via
email: ladonna@sunset.usc.edu
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