Taking Software Engineering to a New Place

Sometimes life intervenes and gives you a bonus. Since the last post I have started a new position, which will allow me to exercise my  knowledge of software engineering. Unfortunately it has taken awhile to get up to speed and return to this blog. I will continue with the theme of going through the Knowledge Areas, but will also intersperse what I am doing in my new position.

I am now working for The HDF Group. The folks here are top notch and the products they produce are excellent! So what can I contribute in software engineering that would make a difference? That’s the wonderful aspect of software engineering in general – there’s always room for improvement. What I have found is that they have developed significant software engineering practices. This is due in large part to education and the development environment. The opportunity for me, as a newcomer, is to document the practices and the principles behind them, gather all the odd papers and notes, and develop a reference system of these practices. Eventually, one learns how the operation works, as long as the folks with the knowledge are available. [Or you stumble through]

I also hope to work in the principles behind lean and agile software development. This includes my recent understanding of the need to seperate project management from software development, and rediscover systems engineering. I will soon be presenting a couple of lean software development seminars based heavily on Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s two books. I will upload them here as usual. Also, I hope to tailor a seminar based on Tom Gilb’s work to the development environment here.

Finally, I am already making plans to be at the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago this summer!

Allen

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