Improving Software Economics

Walker E. Royce
Vice President, Rational Lab Services, IBM SWG

Friday, 21 April 2006
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

For more than twenty years, Rational has been working with the world’s largest software development organizations across the entire spectrum of software domains. Today, we employ more than 1,000 software engineering professionals who work onsite with organizations whose business depends on software. We have harvested and synthesized many lessons from this in-the-trenches experience. We have diagnosed the symptoms of many successful and unsuccessful projects, identified root causes of recurring problems, and captured patterns of software project success into a set of best practices packaged in the Rational Unified Process. Improvements in the economics of software development have been not only difficult to achieve, but also difficult to measure and substantiate. Our six tried-and-true best practices have been the basis for the evolution of our tools and process offerings for more than a decade. This presentation will provide an overview of these best practices. It will present a context independent framework for reasoning about the priorities in improving software economics and tailoring guidance for applying these techniques in the context of your specific domain, culture and business priorities.

Walker Royce is the Vice President of IBM’s Worldwide Rational Lab Services. Walker joined Rational in 1994 and served as Vice President of Professional Services from 1997 through IBM’s acquisition of Rational in 2003. He has managed large software engineering projects, consulted with a broad spectrum of IBM's worldwide customer base, and developed a software management approach that exploits an iterative life cycle, industry best practices, and architecture-first priorities. He is the author of Software Project Management, A Unified Framework (Addison Wesley Longman, 1998) and a principal contributor to the management philosophy inherent in Rational's Unified Process. Before joining Rational, Walker spent 16 years in software project development, software technology development, and software management roles at TRW Electronics & Defense. He was a recipient of TRW’s Chairman’s Award for Innovation for his contributions in distributed architecture middleware and iterative software processes in 1990 and was named a TRW Technical Fellow in 1992.

Host: Gary Pollice

Refreshments will be served.