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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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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Do you know your business processes well enough to outsource them?

If you read the Daily Telegraph you might have come across the Media  Planet supplement “Sourcing” last Tuesday (March 17th); it had the strap line “Utilising sourcing as part of your business strategy”.

Of course we are all pretty familiar with the now standard model of outsourcing, or off-shoring software development. There are numerous destinations for this, Eastern Europe and India being most common, butalso far eastern countries like China and the Philippines.

Also, we are pretty familiar with outsourcing departments, like Customer Services and Back Office.

But what about outsourcing Business Processes ?

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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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