WPI CS Distinguished Lecturer Series

Enough of Process - Let's do Practices

Ivar Jacobson
Ivar Jacobson Consulting

Monday, February 26^th, 2007
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs Auditorium

Today there are many methods, processes, techniques, etc. that attempt to help project teams conduct their work. While there are indeed some important differences between them, the commonalities are far greater: the end goal is for all of us to get working software. Thus adopting complete processes does not make practical sense. Instead the focus should be on being able to mix and match ideas from many different sources inside or outside our own world and compose these ideas to get a better way to work. Over the years we have more and more come to realize that these separate ideas are well represented by practices. Practices are first class citizens: process is just a composition of practices. Practices are to software development teams what use cases are to software systems: they have a beginning and an end and they provide identifiable values to the stakeholders. Practices come from individuals from different camps around the world, such as from the agile camp or the process improvement camp. A practice-centric view of software development as opposed to a process-centric view is the new paradigm shift.

______

Dr. Ivar Jacobson was born in Ystad, Sweden. He got his Master of Electrical Engineering at Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg. He received his Ph.D. at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1985 with a thesis on Language Constructs for Large Real Time Systems. He was a visiting scientist at the Functional Programming and Dataflow Architecture Group at MIT in 1983-84. In 2003 he was awarded the Gustaf Dalén Medal by The Chalmers Alumni Association. Dr Jacobson founded the Swedish company Objectory AB, which merged with Rational in 1995. He was with Rational until it was acquired by IBM in 2003. In 2004, he founded Ivar Jacobson Consulting, whose aim is to promote and help project teams across the world to apply good software development practices. The firm is now operating in five countries: Singapore, Korea, China, UK and the US.

Hosts: Gary Pollice & Michael Gennert

Refreshments will be served.

Maintained by webmaster@cs.wpi.edu
Last modified: Fri Feb 9 18:01:00 EST 2007