Training Software Engineers – Part 4 – Project-led Teaching

In the final part of this series of posts on Training Software Engineers, having spent time talking about academic curricula and the subjects taught, I want to think about the methods used in educating software engineers and computer scientists. It’s a fairly simple premise: we need to be trained less on tasks which we carry out frequently.

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Training Software Engineers – Part 3 – Aspect-Oriented Teaching

While recently pulling together over 130 hours of video-based training material for software engineers and project managers I was reminded of how regularly a number of key aspects kept cropping up, even as we looked at very different software engineering practices and ideas, like SSADM, UML, BPMN, test driven development, risk management and so on.  In an ideal teaching environment I would love to see these concepts form the backbone of the curriculum, so that a student is effectively able to navigate the course content through following the concepts, while at the same time covering a wide range of topics.

Let’s call this ‘aspect-oriented teaching’ and consider how it might work…

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Training Software Engineers – Part 2 – The Importance of a Balanced Viewpoint

In this second post on how we go about training software engineers, I’ll be considering the point raised by a non-geek friend of mine once. “You computer guys seem to get so protective of the tools you use!” he exclaimed before going on to claim that the French car he drove was so much better than my solid VW! Taking a solid stance on technology use seems to be the norm now for technologists. We choose our platform, tools and so on, and will fight almost to the death to protect our use of them and will evangelise endlessly to any who’ll listen – and many who won’t – about why they’re so much better than those others may use.

Is this really an attitude we should be passing on to future generations of computer scientists?

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Training Software Engineers – Part 1 – Conventional Techniques

I’ve been involved in some significant training programmes over recent months and have come to realise a few things about the way we seem to teach our craft. These experiences are drawn from close to 200 hours of training I’ve delivered, developed or co-presented in the last year, which have ranged in content from ‘traditional’ techniques such as SSADM through to ‘contemporary’ agile and test-driven development. In this first post in the series, I’ll consider the relevance of the more mature approaches to software engineering to those currently learning the profession.

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Outsourcing Development

A year or so ago, Callum Potter blogged about an article regarding the outsourcing of business processes, and the role that Business Motivation Modeling (BMM) techniques and Business Process Modeling using BPMN can play in facilitating this. I’ve continued to investigate the needs of the outsourcing community, and have recently published a new whitepaper entitled ‘Outsourcing Development‘ in which I aim to map the challenges of outsourcing to the application of process support, analysis & design, and asset management tools.

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Easing the ‘complexity’ of BPMN

As a consultant with a business and systems modeling tool vendor, the conversations I have involving business analysts invariably seem to turn to the perceived complexity of the business process modeling notation (BPMN).

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Why? Identifying the purpose of business systems

Those familiar with the Zachman framework will recognise the need for identifying the ‘Why?’, and certainly I’ve come across many projects where without a clear indicator of the business reasoning behind development of new systems, those systems have, not surprisingly, failed to fully meet the business needs. Read the rest of this entry »

One man’s goal is another man’s objective

In my travels in recent weeks, talking to clients about the business motivation model, I’ve been struck by the number of folks who have welcomed the BMM simply because it provides a definition and context for business planning terms like goal and objective. While many have tried to communicate their business plan to a wider internal audience, it seems that too much time is often spent simply agreeing the meaning of the vocabulary in use. The application of a defined meta-model for business strategy should allow them to move more quickly beyond the semantics and into the plan itself. Read the rest of this entry »