Events

HOW GOOD IS YOUR ORGANISATION AT MANAGING ITS PEOPLE

The People Capability Maturity Model®(P-CMM) is a framework that helps organisations improve their workforce management practices. This three-day course introduces those who are involved in managing people to P-CMM Version 2.0, its fundamental concepts, and the value it can bring to organizations using it.

The P-CMM is a framework that organizations can use to attract, motivate, and retain talented staff. The practices in the model help an organization be an employer of choice and ensure that the staff has the competencies and capabilities to achieve the organization's current and future business objectives.

The South African Service Management Proficiency Index (SMPI) reveals some interesting trends on the current gaps organisations are experiencing in Service Management and provides an in-depth guide on how to address these shortfalls. Join Christopher Jones, CEO of Digiterra, as he discusses the SMPI.

The lecture explores the commonalities of systems, organizational and buildings architecture. The presentation discusses architectural requirements as well as designing an architecture using architectural patterns, strategies and reference architectures. The lecture looks at architecture across levels of granularity. A core responsibility of an architect is to be able to assess and validate existing architectures. The lecture concludes with ways of assessing an architecture.

TPI (Test Process Improvement) Next is a Business Driven Test Process Improvement model as described by Sogeti [2009].  Join Peter Sage from Test and Data Services to learn how the model, that is essentially driven by business needs, can be adapted to CMMi by using the CMMi level that is desired to drive the order of improvement.

Architecture in an Agile World (or maybe it's the other way around)

There often seems to be a tension that surfaces between the process (that which guides us) and the execution (that which we do).  Agility and architecture also play out in this same way, and it can be a very destructive.  Yet, each side needs the other to exist.  The architecture that you create depends on your attitude, perception and degree of agility.  From the other end, you can reach varying degrees of agility, depending on your attitude, perception and knowledge of the problem and it's architectural solution.  In this session, we will turn this tension into a powerful force that you can use to achieve a balance between keeping the problem and it's solution under control.

TSP – Somewhere between Agile and Plan-driven: Report on a pilot adoption programme in SA

Some Agile practitioners tend to see the world in black and white. In their eyes software development can either be done using an “agile approach” or a “plan driven” approach. In recent years, a grey area in between these extremes has emerged. The “Team Software Process” (TSP) and “Personal Software Process” (PSP) falls within this grey area. While a TSP team follows most of the key agile practices, the role of planning, following a process and, above all, collecting and using measurements is paramount.

SEPG North America" is the Software Engineering Institute (SEI)'s big annual process improvement gathering. In March 2010 it was held in Savannah, Georgia, and was attended by nearly 1,000 process experts and software engineers from around the world. Some of the highlights of the conference were papers on Cloud Computing, CMMI and Agile, CMMI for Services and a "multi-model" approach to process improvement. There was also a forum on the upcoming CMMI version 1.3, due for release later in 2010.  Barry Dwolatzky, Director of the JCSE was one of the few attendees from Africa.  He presented an overview of some of the important papers presented at SEPG 2010.

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ICSE encompassed a conference programme, technical tutorials and workshops, a programme of demonstrations and an exhibition along with social functions, providing an ideal opportunity to learn and network with like-minded colleagues from around the world.

The Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) at Wits University hosted

Dr Paul Clements

from the Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, USA

Paul Clements, a leading international authority on software architecture and co-author of 5 books and numerous papers and conference presentations, was visiting South Africa to attend the ICSE Conference in Cape Town.

On Friday 30^th April the JCSE hosted a public lecture at Wits University. Paul Clements  talked on "Software Product Lines".

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We have seen the use and abuse of the architectural views suggested by different architecture guidelines, but we seldom see the usage of those guidelines yield the desired results. Often the TOGAF guidelines are flouted to present an architecture for the sake of presenting it. But do these views always answer the questions related to all apsects of a system? We have seen many times the architecture views leave too many things to be interpreted subjectively by the implementation team leading to failure during implementation. Can there be a list of architecture views which could serve as a definitive list for all system architectures? How does the Solution and Enterprise Architecture meet the Business Architecture? How do we merge these successfully?

Here is a list of views suggested to see the system architecture from different angles and leave very little for subject to interpretation:

1. Contextual Views
2. Logical Views
3. Information Architecture Views
4. Functional Views
5. Integration Views
6. Data Views
7. Security Views (component security, perimeter security, transport level security etc.)
8. Deployment Views (Hardware Topology, Software Topology, Hardware Sizing views)

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Small software companies make for the majority of software companies around the world, but their software development processes are often not as clearly defined and structured as in their larger counterparts. The testing process is often the most neglected part of their software development process. This talk covers the analyses of the software testing process in a small South African company.

Ahmed Omarjee is an experienced software developer at Psybergate who has been practising agile development at both a business and technical level for the past 6 years.

Ahmed shared his practical experiences and tips on adopting Continuous Integration using Hudson (http://hudson.dev.java.net).

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The JCSE and the South African Electrotechnical Export Council  joined forces to bring you a workshop on Government Tax Incentives for R&D and Software Development, funding support for registering products in a foreign market and Intellectual Property: Create It, Protect It and Make Money.

In this Gauteng SPIN Prof Barry Dwolatzky (Director of the JCSE) gave a progress report on the TSP Pilot currently underway at Nedbank and Dariel Solutions.

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The Architecture Forum started the new year with an open discussion where industry professionals nominated topics for discussion in the months to come.

Tania Van Wyk De Vries, software development manager at Devstream discussed the key issues that affect her team daily and talked about the actions they took to address them - and introduce true agility.

This is a new one-day executive introduction to the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) model used for process improvement.

Andre Van Der Schyff lead the discussion around Lean Software Development and its comparison with Agile Development.

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Dr Chuck Myers presented  THE 2009 CMMI® WORKSHOP SERIES

• 29 Sep:                   Acquisition Supplement for CMMI (1 day) - Official SEI course
• 30 Sep-2 Oct:       IPSi's CMMI Development for System Acquirers Workshop
• 5-8 Oct:                 Accelerating Process Improvement Workshop (4 days)
• 12 Oct:                   IPSi's CMMI Bootcamp (at the Riverside Hotel on the Vaal)

In this forum the speaker  presented his views on the value of governing bodies, accreditation and professionalism in the IT industry and the effect this has on project success rates in other industries such as engineering and construction.

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CMMI "Constellations": Process Improvement models to support Development, Acquisition and Services. Dr Chuck Myers discussed the three "constellations" in the CMMI Product Suite (i) development of new products and services (ii) service delivery, and (iii) acquisition of products and services.

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Khalid Ally Khalid discussed behavioural traits of agile teams. Having worked with a few teams now, he shared some of his thoughts regarding the personality traits required of agile team members and how they relate to the agile principles and practices.

Dr Bill Nichols and Jim McHale, experts from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), are currently in South Africa training developers and launching two TSP projects. Nichols and McHale will address the SPIN. The plans for the TSP Pilot, and the scope for companies to join will be discussed. 

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The Department of Trade and Industry (the dti) presented several practical initiatives for improving business performance to senior management and decision makers from companies in the ICT sector.

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JCSE Partners, Barone, Budge and Dominick (BB&D), Microsoft and IBM provided experts in Cloud Computing to lead a Round Table Discussion on this new paradigm for software development.

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Have you ever asked yourself how you can improve your ability to plan - knowing how difficult it is to create meaningful estimates? The presentation at this Agile Forum presented an agile approach to planning that provides techniques to estimate the size of work to be delivered. These techniques prioritize the delivery of the highest value items first, and then focus on scheduling the delivery of these items in a sufficient plan. You will discover that planning is not just something that occurs at the start of a project, but is an activity that should continuously be part of the software delivery process.

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There has been a lot of discussion around creating agile solutions, but unless the enterprise space is adequately linked to the solution space through true enterprise disciplines, this dream will remain a pipe dream. The JCSE's Architecture Forum in June featured a talk by Craig Martin from Knotion, who described how the 'enterprise space' and the 'solution space' link together, and how 'enterprise thinking' must drive 'solution thinking' to enable true business agility. The discussion  also refered to the use of Archimate, UML and the SOA style to achieve this.

In a bid to address the economic and skills crisis, ITA in partnership with JCSE and IT Web as a media partner hosted a Skills Summit on the 19th May at Bytes Technology Group in Midrand.

Scrum was the focus of the JCSE's last Agile Forum. Arrie van der Dussen, from the company Kaizania, is one of South Africa's foremost authorities on Scrum. He, together with Lionel Bisschoff also from Kaizania, lead a discussion on what Scrum is. They introduced Scrum as an Agile Project Management framework. Which was followed by an open Q&A discussion around Scrum.

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The launch of the JCSE Architecture Forum was a great success. The Architecture Forum is a community for IT Architecture professionals in the South African industry.

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Delegates discussed what software engineering is all about in the 21st Century, and what it aims to do.

Agile Software Development - we have all heard of it, some of us may be actually practicing it. Many individuals joined us in a baton-based panel discussion hosted by some of our industry architects. We discussed the definition of Agile Software Development with respect to "real world" experiments and experiences.  

Our  first session of the year opened up with some topical discussion around personal experiences we have all had with the application of Agile in our projects. Lisa Lyhne from Dariel Solutions and Dimitri Vratsanos from Psybergate opened the discussion by sharing some of their ‘war stories' with the audience.

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On the 18th November 2008 the JCSE host a Round Table discussion on the question: "How do we develop software for computationally instensive applications?" There were presentations from Prof Colin Wright (Centre for High Performance Computing). Prof Scott Hazelhurst (Centre for Bioinformatics, Wits University), Dr Wimpie Clarke (University of Johannesburg) and Dean Redelinghuys (OPTI-NUM Solutions). Participants at the Round Table included vendors of HPC solutions, academics and members of the user community including banks and the mining industry.

In 2009 the JCSE will arrange several follow-on activities.

P2 and Rory Burke, internationally renowned author, presented this two day Master Class and developed a clear understanding of Project Methodology, together with Project Leadership skills and Project Team dynamics and discuss how both skill sets are required to manage a project to successful completion.

Prof Barry Dwolatzky, Director: JCSE at Wits University reported back on the tour to Mexico and the States to investigate the benefits of Team Software Process (TSP) and Personal Software Process (PSP).

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Chuck Myers is probably the world's most experienced CMMI instructor. He has, over the past 20 years, worked closely with the SEI delivering CMMI training around the world.  This 5 day course, which Chuck developed himself, focused on preparing delegates to be CMMI experts.

Dr Chuck Myers, President & CEO, Integrated Process Solutions, USA provided an overview of the need to address three different dimensions for effective implementation: technical, process and organisational. 

The Process Improvement Briefing focussed on all aspects of process improvement. The Briefing  introduced theTeam Software Process (TSP), the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the People Capability Maturity Model (PCMM), methods and models which have been designed to accelerate the implementation of CMMI in an organisation.

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Introduction to People Capability Maturity Model (People CMM) - The People Capability Maturity Model (People CMM) is a framework that helps organisations successfully address their critical people issues. Based on the best current practices in fields such as human resources, knowledge management, and organizational development, the People CMM guides organisations in improving their processes for managing and developing their workforces.

The JCSE and QuantiMetrics presented a Master Class which discussed software sizing, estimation and benchmarking.

Aslam Khan presented on Behavior Driven Development (BDD), a framework that focuses on producing testable requirements. It addresses the problem of poorly defined stories by capturing each feature as a set of behaviors. BDD follows a strongly user-focused approach by describing contexts for business events that yield value driven business outcomes.  

Martin Rennhackkamp from PBT Group explained how BI capability should be positioned and be managed to align it with the business’ strategic goals and objectives.

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Prof. Barry Dwolatzky and  Dr Pieter van Zyl from Nedbank reported back on the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) annual SEPG Conference.

Chris Naidoo from Psybergate discussed The Test Driven Development lifecycle using practical examples

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The SA Electrotechnical Export Council presented this morning seminar on Intellectual Property. Don MacRobert, seasoned Patent and Intellectual Property lawyer, presented how to create it and protect it, and how to get Government funding support for obtaining patents.

Wayne Mallinson discussed the critical link between testing and successful software development.

Dr Dave Zubrow, Team Lead of the Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis Initiative from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, discussed how to define and use measures to manage and improve software projects, products, and processes.

Prof Barry Dwolatzky, Director of the JCSE presented the SEI’s Team Software Process and Personal Software Process(TSP and PSP) methodologies.

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Ernest Mnkandla presented a discussion on how to tailor your agile practices to your given project environment and still remain within the benefits of agility.

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Jim Over, Team Lead of the TSP Initiative from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Melon University, presented a SPIN on the benefits of TSP/PSP and his experience in implementing TSP/PSP.

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Presentation 1 (930 KB)
Presentation 2 (1.5 MB)

Tetyana Loskutova discussed how db4objects Inc successfully uses an XP methodology and agile processes in a team spread over 9 countries.

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Dr Chuck Myers

The first CMMI® (Capability Maturity Model Integration®) two-day symposium focussed on introducing CMMI® to the African market. The Symposium unpacked how CMMI® assists companies with process improvement, the CMMI® rating system and the business benefits of CMMI® from a local and international perspective. Follow the above link to download resources from this event.