Second Keynote
I didn’t live-blog during the keynote yesterday, because it was an hour and a half, and I figured I wouldn’t have enough battery. Since today’s was only an hour, I fired up the laptop. Here’s the goods:
Announcements (DavidI)
- Product ordering to get conference discount: http://shop.discount.com/ or go to Programmers’
- Turn in conference evaluation form this afternoon by
- Tonight’s party is in the same room lunches are in. (Looks like they’ll have real food this year, too!)
- Tomorrow, starting at
- Borland’s SDO strategy: quick recap
- Why being a developer sucks… even though we’re gods at what we do
- So how is Borland helping control the madness?
- Learn about the infrastructure being developed in order to enable the SDO vision
- Partner testimonial, Accenture
SDO Strategy
- Getting Good at Software – at the company level
- Controlling the forces WITHIN AND AROUND a development organization
- Being able to answer these questions:
- Are you doing software right?
- Are you doing the right software?
- How do you know?
Getting good at software means:
- Better targeting opportunities. Management needs to be making decisions based on the most important thing for the business.
- Increase time-to-value of software
- Improving quality
- Minimizing risk, maximizing predictability
- Reducing cost
SDO is about answering:
- Are you doing software right, *as an organization*? Right amount of QA? Capturing requirements?
- Are you doing the right software? Nothing pisses a developer off as much as when they get jerked around by management.
- How do you know? Measure.
Controlling the forces…
- …that impact a developer
- Which projects get funded?
- How much rigor goes into that decision-making process?
- Which engineers get deployed? Skills, experience, availability
- The physics of scope, schedule, resources
- The impact of change…
- Timeliness, fidelity, and accuracy of requirements (e.g., up-front requirements documents)
- …and the list goes on.
Top reasons why it rocks, and why it sucks, to be a developer
- Why it ROCKS:
- 3. Never-ending constant supply of new technologies to learn and use – enjoyable
- 2. You can realize your ideas and dreams without the burden of physical materials – empowering
- 1. With every single non-trivial endeavor in the world today, software is on the critical path. You get to solve tough problems for the planet, and sometimes even change the world – seriously satisfying
- Why it SUCKS:
- 10. Research – never enough time for the “R” in R&D
- 9. Technology – it changes faster than I can code for it. (You get to play with those betas, but they crash.)
- 8. Process – often makes life harder, doesn’t guide me on what’s next
- 7. Communication – difficult to bridge cultures, language, timezones
- 6. Bugs – not hard to fix… hard to find and hard to track
- 5. Outsourcing – thread of job getting “shipped overseas” (or to eastern Europe, if you’re Marco)
- 4. Schedules – never enough time, impossible to estimate time/scope/risk
- 3. Requirements – hard to track, never enough detaiol, becomes stale
- 2. IT Managers: if they had brains they’d be dangerous – care about the bottom line, we care about the software
- 1. Resources – never enough… and tradeoffs? what’s a tradeoff? How often do you have a conversation with management where they make a tradeoff?
- All of this is out of your control.
SDO is helping to control external forces
- E.g. Management decision making
- Management tools tied to development reality
- Rigor in decision making
- Good information = better decision making
- E.g. The Garbage-In/Garbage-Out problem
- Good requirement fidelity = higher probability of getting it right
- High-touch, VISUAL dialog with users: a good thing.
Demos
- Tempo demo – wizard that asks the manager questions to nail down the requirements and importance
- Requirements elicitation – draw flowcharts, create storyboards with photos of existing customers
- Generates requirements, test cases, etc.
- Shows current project status automatically, so you don’t need to spend time in status meetings or even manually updating status
- “Requirement Elicitation”
- Where the business meets engineering
- Get requirements out of low-fidelity text, and into visual media
- Higher fidelity = lower rework
- Lower rework = happier developers
- “Portfolio Management”
- Buzzword alignment: “IT Governance”, “Project Portfolio Management”
- Real-time, data-driven status
- IT decision making with DATA
- IT decision making with PROCESS and RIGOR
- Better decision making = less churn
- Less churn = happier developers
- Getting external forces under control makes more productive, happier developers
- Bridge the language gap between developers and management
Futures: Raaj Shinde, VP SDO Platform
Shape of things to come:
- “Common metamodel”: Software process
- Authoring
- Orchestration
- Monitoring
- Guidance
- Hooks for other vendors’ software, e.g. Rational, Subversion
Donald Gravlin, CTO, Accenture Healthcare Practice
- Leading health care organization’s business needs
- Spiraling costs are forcing healthcare to be more efficient
- Consumer driven healthcare is driving real-time information demand from the “Quicken” generation (both consumers & physicians)
- Regional health information networks require application interop &* collaboration – a $200B software opportunity
- HCOs require IT resources to focus on new products & services
- Pain points
- Rework of legacy environment required to transition toa SOA platform
- Lack of governance of distriuted IT development and integration
- Rapidly changing regulatory requirements & time/cost of getting it wrong
- Poor visibility and predictability of software will cost lives
- What Accenture likes about Borland’s direction
- Borland gets what it takes to be world class developers
- Acquisition of Tempo
- Rapid development of elicitation technology
- Investment in building a platform
3 things you need to remember
- SDO is relevant to developers
- Borland is committed to delivering SDO
- We value you, our loyal customers