button_present_small.jpg (5221 bytes) button_future_small.jpg (5652 bytes)Past Meetings

2004-2005 Season

_________(in reverse chronological order)________

Click here for the Past Meetings Page

______________________________________________________________________

June 8, 2005

“CMMI Acquisition Module: Looking at the CMMI from an Acquirer's Perspective”

By Mike Bandor

Member of the Technical Staff at the SEI

 

In February 2004, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) released an acquisition module based on the CMMI framework. The Acquisition Module (CMMI-AM) provides guidance to acquisition organizations on how to apply the CMMI. This presentation will discussion the CMMI-AM, how it looks at the framework from an acquisition perspective, and the new changes from v1.0 to v1.1.
 

You may contact Mike Bandor at mbandor@sei.cmu.edu or (210) 380-5563.  Our presenter has graciously granted us permission to place a copy of his slides on our web site.   The slides are in Adobe Acrobat format and are available by clicking the file name Saspin_June2005_Bandor.pdf , (1.140 Mb)

 

Best viewed with the latest Acrobat Reader, which is version 7 or higher.  If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later you must use Adobe Acrobat 5 or later to view and print the slides and if you wish to save the file you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later. 
With Netscape you may view, save or print the slides with Adobe Acrobat 5 or later.

  If you don’t already have the Acrobat Reader click on the image to the left to download the latest version free.

 

______________________________________________________________________

May 18, 2005

Global Business Process Improvement

By William Grundstrom

Dell, Inc.

 

BPI Facts

Mission Statement:  To empower employees with the knowledge, skill, and tools in order to make their processes more efficient through reduced cycle time, improved quality, lower costs and VOC.

Program Origin:  The program was initiated in 1998 by a BPI Taskforce made up of representatives from Manufacturing and Global Dell Learning to address process improvement issues.  A team of Dell associates developed a five day Green Belt course and trained 1200 Dell and key supplier participants in the first year.  All material and applications of Dell’s BPI program have been designed and developed by Dell.

Purpose:  BPI is a set of tools and applications that drive the customer experience.  Tools that people and teams can use to understand, interrogate, and improve processes, thereby adding value to every customer interaction with Dell.  It means looking at all aspects of our business -  order through delivery and post-sale service - from the customer's perspective and asking,  "How can we improve our business processes?"

Design:  The program methodology follows the traditional Six Sigma model with the addition of a sixth step called Reporting.  A key element in Dell’s BPI program is the sharing of Key Learnings and Best Practices worldwide. We believe if we can duplicate our successful projects in other parts of our business we will accelerate improvements.  Other unique aspects of Dell’s BPI is the emphasis on Yellow Belt and Executive Belt Training along with a comprehensive website that promotes on line learning and applications. 

Value Proposition:  The areas of value for Dell driven by BPI are identified in Dell’s Winning Culture Initiative enhancing employee problem solving skills, a sense of pride and accomplishment through completed projects, the spirit of being on a winning team, the ability of improving quality of work life by making work processes more efficient in quality, cost, time and VOC and thus generating annual financial savings worldwide, which makes Dell and all employees more successful.

Governance:  Program governance is provided by a council and taskforce structure tied from the Executive Office to the BPI Area Champions within the Business Units.  A Global Team administers the program and designs, develops, implements and monitors the tactical aspects of the program. Within each Region and Business Unit, BPI Business Champions provide coordination and logistic support for local planning and program implementation.

Methodology:  BPI within Dell is the overarching approach used to improve business processes. The foundation program has six steps: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control and Report, which address processes that are established and in place.  For product design and the improvement of processes that are not well defined our established Design For Six Sigma (DMADV)/(DMADDD) are appropriate.  We are also integrating Lean and other supporting concepts and approaches under the BPI umbrella.

Application: BPI is applied worldwide in all functions within Dell. It is also being used in support of our suppliers and customers.

Achievements:  BPI savings in hard, soft and avoidance dollars to date has been $4.6B in savings with approximately 65% of that total in hard savings and accomplished through the completion of 5, 600 BPI projects worldwide. 

Many knowledgeable people confuse architecture with infrastructure. So, what is architecture and what does it mean to to software projects?   This presentation will introduce the concept of software architecture and it's role in the development of complex software systems.  It will show how to approach a problem as an architect, explain the difference between engineering and architecture, identify some of the critical competencies of a software architect, illustrate why the best engineers are not necessarily the best architects, and identify resources for further study.

The presenter may be contacted at William_Grundstrom@dell.com .

______________________________________________________________________

April 13, 2005

“Architecture:  IT's Missing Link”

By Roland Berg

Dilgent Consulting, Inc.

 

There are many causes for the inability of organizations to complete large software projects successfully.  One of the most common points of failure is architecture.  Architecture is a fundamental component of any system.  Whether you know it or not your system has architecture.  Whether it is good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, depends on how that architecture came into being.

Many knowledgeable people confuse architecture with infrastructure. So, what is architecture and what does it mean to to software projects?   This presentation will introduce the concept of software architecture and it's role in the development of complex software systems.  It will show how to approach a problem as an architect, explain the difference between engineering and architecture, identify some of the critical competencies of a software architect, illustrate why the best engineers are not necessarily the best architects, and identify resources for further study.

Our presenter has graciously granted us permission to place a copy of his slides on our web site.   The slides are in Adobe Acrobat format and are available by clicking the file name  Saspin_Apr2005_Berg.pdf   (543 Kb).  

 

Best viewed with the latest Acrobat Reader, which is version 7 or higher.  If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later you must use Adobe Acrobat 5 or later to view and print the slides and if you wish to save the file you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later. 
With Netscape you may view, save or print the slides with Adobe Acrobat 5 or later.

  If you don’t already have the Acrobat Reader click on the image to the left to download the latest version free.

 

______________________________________________________________________

March 9, 2005

“Riding the Next Wave of Innovation”

By Henry (Skeeter) Lieberum, MA

 

“The rate of innovation is rapidly increasing primary due to technology enhancements and enablers of business processes.  Businesses can by overwhelmed by the crash of the latest greatest innovation, sometimes with several of these waves crashing in at once.  How can businesses be ready for the next wave, find the right one to ride, and successfully implement without significant negative impacts on the business and their people?  Understand the dynamics of change, how technology projects and business impacts align at the right time, and learn from your experience riding waves in the past.”

Our presenter has graciously granted us permission to place a copy of his slides on our web site.   The slides are in Adobe Acrobat format and are available by clicking the file name  Saspin_March2005_Lieberum.pdf   (73 Kb).  

 

Best viewed with the latest Acrobat Reader, which is version 7 or higher.  If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later you must use Adobe Acrobat 5 or later to view and print the slides and if you wish to save the file you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later. 
With Netscape you may view, save or print the slides with Adobe Acrobat 5 or later.

  If you don’t already have the Acrobat Reader click on the image to the left to download the latest version free.

 

______________________________________________________________________

February 16, 2005

“CMMI Level 1 to Assessed Level 3 in 8 Months! … Impossible, You Say?”

Presented by

David Srulowitz

Process Engineering Consultant

Software Engineering Solutions (SES)

 

Dave will share the story of SES’ recent (May 04 - Jan 05) CMMI Level 3 facilitation engagement, in which they started working with a government contractor software development organization that was not practicing CMMI when the engagement started.  When the contractor’s government customer informed them they needed to be assessed as operating at SE-SW CMMI Level 3, Staged Representation, as an entering argument to recompete for their contract at renewal, they only had 8 months to react.  This is truly a case of survival, as if the contractor could not respond in time, nearly 30 people would be out of a job.  Although the average time to move from operating at one CMMI level to the next higher level typically takes between 2-3 years, SES answered their call for assistance and got the job done, surprising even Dave.  Dave will discuss this SES project, the team members who worked it, their project approach, starting conditions, SES’ methodology, a little about the model, some implementation highlights, what it took to prepare the organization for certification, and lessons learned. 

Our presenter has graciously granted us permission to place a copy of his slides on our web site.   The slides are in Adobe Acrobat format and are available by clicking the file name  Saspin_Feb2005_Srulowitz.pdf   (136 Kb).  

 

Best viewed with the latest Acrobat Reader, which is version 7 or higher.  If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later you must use Adobe Acrobat 5 or later to view and print the slides and if you wish to save the file you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later. 
With Netscape you may view, save or print the slides with Adobe Acrobat 5 or later.

  If you don’t already have the Acrobat Reader click on the image to the left to download the latest version free.


January 12, 2005

Writing Defect Free Requirements

Presented by

Ivy Hooks

Compliance Automation

 

It is obvious that if we do not have the correct requirements we will not get the desired product.  Still every study about cost and schedule overruns and failed software projects lists requirement problems among the top three culprits.  Clearly, getting defect-free requirements is difficult, but essential to providing quality, timely and cost-effective products. 

Requirement problems affect all industries and all types of projects.  Types of defects are not industry or project unique, they range from missing requirements to stating implementation instead of requirements, from poorly written and ambiguous to just plain wrong.  Some of the defects can be avoided by using standards and educating the writers and reviewers.  Some of the defects will have to be removed after the writing, but before design has begun. 

We will address the common defects and avoidance and removal methods that can be put in place to rapidly improve the quality and timeliness of the requirements. 

1.  Defect types

2.  Reasons for problems

3.  How to prevent or remove defects

            Implementation or design (how not what)

            Incorrect information

            Omissions

            Ambiguities and poorly written

 Learning objectives

            Seeing requirements problems categorized – fix problem not symptom

            Recognizing tools to incorporate in your process to get defect-free requirements

You may contact Ivy Hooks at Compliance Automation, (830) 249-0308, CAI@complianceautomation.com .

Our presenter has graciously granted us permission to place a copy of his slides on our web site.   The slides are in Adobe Acrobat format and are available by clicking the file name  Saspin_January2005_Hooks.pdf   (1.205 Mb).  

 

Best viewed with the latest Acrobat Reader, which is version 7 or higher.  If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later you must use Adobe Acrobat 5 or later to view and print the slides and if you wish to save the file you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later. 
With Netscape you may view, save or print the slides with Adobe Acrobat 5 or later.

  If you don’t already have the Acrobat Reader click on the image to the left to download the latest version free.

 

______________________________________________________________________

November 10, 2004

Mission Critical Instructional Design

Presented by

Tim Youngman

Karta Technologies

 

Southwest Airlines grew over the past 32 years from a struggling start-up with 3 aircraft serving 3 Texas cities into the most successful airline operation in the world. Today the company has 35,000 employees, 4,200 pilots and 370 airplanes that serve 59 airports with 2,900 daily departures. Approximately 2 years ago the company embarked upon a “clean sheet of paper” review of flight operations procedures with the goal of making flight operations safer and easier. Southwest consulted with human factors experts at NASA Ames, aircraft operations authorities at the Boeing Company, and with various experts in the field of checklist construction format. Based on this expertise, the company developed a new design for its normal operating checklists and supporting procedures to increase crew interaction, communication, and situational awareness. The result is a product that establishes a new industry standard in flight operations and enables Southwest Airlines to continue to provide positive, outrageous service to its customers.

The challenge in implementing these procedures was to provide effective and engaging training to Southwest’s 4,200 pilots. In order to make the switch airline-wide to the new flight operations procedures, each member of the pilot population had to be trained within approximately a 1-month time frame. The training had to communicate succinctly the technical details of the new checklist procedures while demonstrating clearly the safety, situational awareness, and efficiency advantages of this new method of flight operations. In addition, the results of training had to be appropriately documented to validate that each and every pilot was successfully trained and ready to fly in accordance with the new procedures. Finally, this solution had to provide the pilots with a ready reference for recurrent training and a resource for training new pilots in flight operations procedures.

In support of this training initiative Karta was selected to provide interactive courseware materials to facilitate training and assessment on the new flight operations procedures. Karta developed a computer-based training program to allow pilots to successfully complete training on their own schedule. The training content provides an engaging presentation of the technical details of each new procedure item. Each checklist item is demonstrated and the training provides interactive assessment questions. Upon successful completion of the program a completion key is generated that was used to update the pilot’s training record. Finally, Karta developed the interactive content in accordance with industry standards, delivered it in a CD-ROM format and provided a hosted learning management system (LMS) to facilitate pilot access to the training.

Clearly these new operational procedures represent a fundamental change to how Southwest provides “positively outrageous service” to its customers on a daily basis and is of strategic importance to the company. By utilizing the unique approach proposed by Karta, Southwest trained its entire pilot population within a 1-month time period and for less than 5% of the cost of bringing pilots into the Flight Training Center to conduct this training.

This presentation described how the business analysis was conducted, the manner in which the instructional systems design process was implemented, and how the return on investment was evaluated. 

Our presenter has graciously granted us permission to place a copy of his slides on our web site.   The slides are in Adobe Acrobat format and are available by clicking the file name  Saspin_Nov2004_Youngman.pdf   (1.463 Mb).  

 

Best viewed with the latest Acrobat Reader, which is version 6 or higher.  If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later you must use Adobe Acrobat 3.01 or later to view and print the slides and if you wish to save the file you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later. 
With Netscape 3 or later you may view, save or print the slides with Adobe Acrobat 3 or later.

  If you don’t already have the Acrobat Reader click on the image to the left to download the latest version free.

 

______________________________________________________________________

October 20, 2004

Building Capabilities for Small Organizations:  Let's Share our Knowledge and not be Stupid!

Presented by

Jorge Boria and Viviana Rubinstein

Liveware Inc.

 

In the Global Market, companies that do not show high maturity have become non-players. For the small software shop where only very few highly capable software professionals perform, this has an ominous ring. The question is not whether small organizations can use process improvement that withstands the scrutiny of a SCAMPI, but whether they can afford it. To the already steep costs, by small business standards, of the SCAMPI activities themselves, the learning curve puts the price far too high for the small organization, which is the one that has the niche capabilities to compete globally.

This has to do with some demands of the model that are difficult to implement in a small group: providing objective evidence of quality, usually best implemented through an independent group of quality engineers; supporting the configuration management activities with audits, usually best done with a central CM group with specialized skills and processes; establishing and maintaining the process asset library, usually best done with specialized process engineers; are but a few examples in which a solution with focused experts in highly centralized roles makes it difficult to implement in the small organization. To the added burden of documenting what, for a five-person group is the obvious, the model adds the cost of having to learn skills that are frequently, if not always, the result of a long apprenticeship. This learning curve and the need for sporadic dips into documenting processes is seen as insurmountable by the small company.

However, as usual, in framing the problem correctly the solution is outlined. In first place, it has long been noted that a lack of documented process is not a lack of process. Tools that support the rapid implementation of process and that help establish and maintain it through partial to full automation are indeed in the market, with varied success.

In our solution, each individual customer has a process that is the captured image of what is usually performed by the projects, so that no drastic changes in behavior are introduced. However, this snapshot of their processes is fully documented, so that gaps and inconsistencies are detected and removed before the process is instantiated to be enacted.

In this way the ease of implementation of process is guaranteed, allowing small companies to make use of prior knowledge in the software engineering community at a very low entry cost. This, however, is only one part of the solution. The second problem to tackle is that of specialized roles as suggested in the CMMI and usually interpreted in the light of the now being sunset SW-CMM. A small organization has too few resources to have special roles for Process and Product Quality Assurance, Configuration Management, or Process Engineering. Even if the role is performed part time by a person or group of persons, the overhead that is created by the need to learn the tools of the trade is above the budget of most small organizations. For some, even a small group of project managers is out of the question.

The solution is then to create a structure in which the organizations, that already share the process tools, share specialists. A group of specialists is trained through a well-established training program, to perform these roles for a group of companies. Since the knowledge required to do this is the product of a long experience, a group that supervises the activities of these specialists is always at hand on a consulting basis. Such a supervising hierarchy all but guarantees that the overall process converges to accelerated process improvement.

Our presenter has graciously granted us permission to place a copy of his slides on our web site.   The slides are in Adobe Acrobat format and are available by clicking the file name  Saspin_Oct2004_Rubinstein_Boria.pdf   (2.545 Mb).  

 

Best viewed with the latest Acrobat Reader, which is version 6 or higher.  If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later you must use Adobe Acrobat 3.01 or later to view and print the slides and if you wish to save the file you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later. 
With Netscape 3 or later you may view, save or print the slides with Adobe Acrobat 3 or later.

  If you don’t already have the Acrobat Reader click on the image to the left to download the latest version free.

______________________________________________________________________

September 8, 2004

Application Security and the SDLC

Presented by

Dan Cornell

Denim Group, Ltd.

 

Due to the rise in popularity of Internet-facing custom web software applications application-level security is a growing area of focus in both the application development and information security fields. The variety of deployment options for custom applications (Internet, Extranet, Intranet, etc) requires that organizations extend their defense-in-depth strategies to the application level. Moving beyond the infrastructure focus of traditional information security practices, application level security involves auditing the code and databases used in custom-developed applications to ensure they behave as expected and provide appropriate controls so that applications continue to function and are safe from disclosing or altering information in an unauthorized manner regardless of attempts to subvert the application logic.

The presentation first provides an overview of application-level security and explores the differences between application level security and traditional information security. By analyzing the cultural differences between application development and security organizations, the presentation spotlights issues bound to surface when information security concerns are applied to software development processes. Given this background, the presentation then steps through a traditional waterfall software development process and examines changes and additions that can be made to more fully integrate application-level security concerns into the development process.

Although application-level security is a highly technical discipline, this presentation covers the technological aspects only to the degree needed to provide sufficient background. The true focus is on the organizational and process issues software development organizations are likely to face when coming to grips with the implications of the burgeoning area of application security.

You can contact Dan Cornell, Denim Group, at http://www.denimgroup.com .

Our presenter has graciously granted us permission to place a copy of his slides on our web site.   Note that the briefing is on the same topic as on June 9, 2004.  The presentation in September was more detailed and contains more slides.  The slides are in Adobe Acrobat format and are available by clicking the file name  Saspin_Sep2004_Cornell.pdf   (697 Kb).   Also attached are copies of John Dickson's Jumpstart documents, the first is for developers (33 Kb) and the second is for information security (32 Kb) professionals.

 

Best viewed with the latest Acrobat Reader, which is version 6 or higher.  If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later you must use Adobe Acrobat 3.01 or later to view and print the slides and if you wish to save the file you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later. 
With Netscape 3 or later you may view, save or print the slides with Adobe Acrobat 3 or later.

  If you don’t already have the Acrobat Reader click on the image to the left to download the latest version free.

______________________________________________________________________

 

 

______________________________________________________________________

Click here for the Past Meetings Page

______________________________________________________________________


Last revised: January 01, 2006