Thanks for this information.  At first, I was puzzled why we were assigned to read an article from 1988....then I was very impressed at how the findings resonated so well with my more recent, personal experiences.  Now it makes sense!

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We read this article recently:

Curtis has been tremendously influential in the software process improvement field, and this Curtis paper was his most highly cited: Google Scholar lists 763 papers which cite it. Of those papers which cite this one, more than fifty of them have been cited more than 50 times, themselves. Of his other papers, 11 that I can find have been cited more than 50 times and six more than 150 times (again according to Google Scholar). Those papers were all written between 1979 and 1995, in the golden years of software methodology resarch.

Other parts of Curtis' work is familiar to us, even if we didn't know he was involved. He is a former director of the Software Process Program at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, the creators of CMM and CMMI. He co-authored the Capability Maturity Model for Software, and was the chief architect of the People Capability Maturity Model (PCMM). PCMM reminds me a lot of a practitioner's approach to achieving a learning organziation.

PCMM reflects what he learned in this paper (as far as I can tell from the summaries I've found):

• The People CMM systematically infuses the required competencies, leading to empowerment. At level 3, the manager begins to trust the process and steps a little back. At level 4, the manager takes advantage of the frame-work installed till level 3, and steps further back. At level 5, interactions of workgroups with those in other units are aligned. Performance is aligned to optimize the system. The model helps systematically manage performance. “The issue is not evaluating individuals. But to bring in continuing discussion of how work is performed.” [1]

Currently, he a founding partner of Capability Measurement (couldn't find anything out about this company) and was until recently the chief process officer of Borland Software Corporation (he remains their chief process advisor). He was the co-founder and chief scientist of TeraQuest Metrics, Inc (acquired in 2005 by Borland), which helped large companies manage and take control of their software development processes [2] .

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This is an e-mail I got (I can't remember how I ever got to their e-mail distribution) just recently and I think the subject has a lot of relevance to our class, most notably with respect to our text.  Unfortunately, the presentation will take place after our class is over.  The presentation may prove valuable to those who will take this class in the future to supplement the text.

 

SOA promises increased flexibility, but how can you ensure its effectiveness? The key lies in SOA Governance. It's what binds all the inherent application fragments together. And it's what drives the desired business results, based on your identified goals. The end result is not only a clearer vision, but the empowerment to make that vision a reality.

For a detailed discussion of what SOA Governance is, why it's important and what related challenges typically arise from it, register for the complimentary online presentation "Making SOA Governance Real: Policy Management and Integrated Registries."

http://www.accelacomm.com/jlp/idgc1/46/80089332/

This presentation, courtesy of IBM and IDG Connect, will take place at 11AM Eastern (8AM Pacific) Thursday, August 2, 2007. If you have a schedule conflict and can't attend, don't worry. Register now anyway, and if you miss the live version, you can watch it later on-demand.

We think you'll find it very interesting.

Best regards,

IDG Connect

P.S. If you attend this live Web Seminar, as a bonus, you will receive complimentary access to a recent IBM whitepaper on Metadata Management as well as a WSRR Demo and a RAM Demo.

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As the group might have guessed, I really enjoyed Paul Witman's talk.  I'm a giant security freak, and I practically started salivating when he started to draw the flow diagram for the ATM transaction... ah, the ways you can game the system!  There are so many links in the chain!  Muh-hahahaha!

No, I'm not really an evil genius or a criminal mastermind.  Really. 

The thing I enjoyed most about the presentation was the fact that he talked about the process of executing a financial transaction without relying solely upon the business rules or the technical rules enforced by the independent objects involved; instead talking about the fact that both sets of rules were encapsulated by the system and indeed the system itself has to be designed to allow different sets of business rules work at different stages of the transaction.  

Here's the "make the ATM dispense more money than it should" story, although I got some of the details muddled with this other story.  The machine in question thought it was dispensing $5 (instead of $10s), and it did indeed occur in the US, not in the UK/Canada.

Edited 07/16/2007 ->  Somebody got away/is getting away with it again.  You'd think this particular loophole would have been closed... 

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This is too funny:-D  

You probably didn't see me, cuz I was stuck back in the back converting some CRM product to Oracle from the native 'C' code it was in.  Did you know Roger Parks or his boss, Howard somethin' or other?  (Can't remember his last name.  Just that he was diabetic, was wearing an insulin pump (experimental), and used to say, "If God wants me to win the Lottery, I won't HAVE to buy a ticket!") It was a strange place to work, with bomb threats from disgruntled HerbaLife ex-employees a couple of times a month!  Remember that?  

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That's the one.  It's amazing how this worked for me because I literally worked for 3 different companies (Locus, Platinum and CA) in a span of 5 years without moving out of the building or office.

I'm surprised I didn't see you there.

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However, caching is very important in designing large systems, it will help to improve performance and save many resources. It is very important for developers and system architect to understand it.

  

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I was a little fuzzy on trying to figure out how the caching examples drawn on the board during Bill Bryant's presentation actually work.  A lot of the articles out there spend too much emphasis on the theory and not enough time explaining in simple terms what the heck is going on.

Wikipedia has two entries on this which seem to help explain this.  The first is their article on Bit Torrents which does a pretty good explanation on what happens in a P2P environment (complete with an animated graphic showing the relationships between nodes).

The other article is on Hashing Algorithms and spends some time explaining what those are and how they can be used.  Simply put, you take values (a title for example) through that into a formula and it spits out a value what can represent the title.  The problem is what to do with Hash Collisions, something that is explained in another article.

Watch, by mentioning this, this question won't be on the final.  Then again, I am wrong from time to time (more often than not when trying to pick what questions will be on a test). 

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Dude!  You used to work for Platinum?  Was that in the HerbaLife building down by LAX?  I used to work for Locus Computing, which was acquired by Platinum somewhere around 1995?  

Just curious... 

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