What’s New
| Stan Rifkin ...
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| | helped to create and now helps to operate the San Diego
Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN). Its web site is temporarily down, otherwise you would be directed there for more information. |
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| | was the presenter of "Software reliability:
What is it, how to measure it, and how to obtain it" at the September 2008 Meeting of the San Diego Chapter of the Society for Software Quality. The subject of reliability historically focuses on a physical condition (that is, applies to hardware), but, of course, that is not applicable to software. Instead, software reliability expresses aspects of the condition of failure-free operation for a specified mission time with respect to a given set of requirements. Over 100 software reliability models have been reported, so we’ll try to make some sense of categories of them. Most literature on software reliability is mathematical and this presentation will try to be conceptual rather than rely on mathematical details. In addition, the assurance aspect will be addressed briefly: how to obtain increased reliability (in light of the definition). |
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| | was the presenter of "Is there a disconnect between organizational strategy and quality?" at the July 2008 Meeting of the San Diego Chapter of the American Society for Quality. As quality professionals why is it that we have to fight so hard to convince our organizations to adopt quality principles and practices? Might it be because in the appropriate priorities for our organizations quality is not placed in the top three? This presentation frames quality improvement initiatives in terms of organizational strategy and explains where -- in different strategies -- quality ranks. It also presents how to re-frame quality in terms of what each strategy is trying to optimize. In the speaker's experience, this re-framing remarkably accelerates the adoption of quality initiatives. |
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| | was the presenter of "Combining systems & software engineering: Who’s in charge of organizational aspects?" at the May 2008 Meeting of the San Diego Chapter of the International Council on Systems Engineering. The systems we develop impact those who consume and use them, but who in systems engineering is in charge of making sure to attend to the human and organizational impacts? We need to shift our world view in order to understand how our systems are seen by those impacted and then take responsibility for that impact, hopefully by prospectively designing the impact to be what we all intended. The presentation gives examples of the new world view and how we might be successful at adopting it. |
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| | was the presenter of "A new way to conduct software inspections -- with data to show effectiveness" the San Diego Software Process Improvement Network meeting February 18, 2008. Software inspections are widely regarded as a cost-effective mechanism for identifying defects in software, though performing them does not always reduce the number of customer-discovered defects. We present a case study in which an attempt was made to reduce such defects through an inspection process and training that introduced program comprehension ideas. The training was designed to address the problem of understanding the artifact being reviewed -- that is, how do we actually find defects in what we are reading, when we are not the original authors -- as well as other perceived deficiencies of a typical inspection process. Measures, both formal and informal, suggest that explicit training in program understanding may significantly improve inspection effectiveness. |
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| | was the guest speaker at the eXtreme Programming San Diego monthly meeting on February 7, 2008. "It all started with bumpers in an automobile plant: What is lean and
why does it matter to software development & management?" The seven wastes, just in time, push vs. pull, six rules of Kanban,
flow, and visual control. These buzzwords will be illustrated in their
original, manufacturing context, and then translated and applied to
systems development and management. This presentation is agnostic to
any particular software interpretation of lean. The presentation is from the perspective of a lean six sigma master black belt that Dr. Rifkin recently achieved. |
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| | was the guest speaker at the eXtreme Programming San Diego monthly meeting on March 5, 2007. He spoke on how to use project/product risk (problem and solution risk, too) to select an appropriate life cycle and software engineering methods, based primarily on the work of Boehm and Turner, in their article, "Using risk to balance agile and plan-driven methods," for example. He illustrated the concepts using risk exposure to trade-off the gains made by planning against the prospect of market erosion due to product delays. What usually arises is the need for a hybrid life cycle that combines the best of the agile framework with the best of plan-driven. Dr. Rifkin showed the current thinking in how to construct that hybrid and how it works. |
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| | has been acknowledged for his work on A Process Research Framework, the first major publication of the three-year work of the International Process Research Consortium, sponsored by the Software Engineering Institute. The text states, "We wish first to acknowledge Dr. Stan Rifkin, who played several different roles for us. He was our discussant at our first workshop, challenging our thinking and synthesizing what he heard from us as he listened to members' initial ideas. He then served as a reviewer, editor, and writer on framework drafts. We thank him for his several invaluable contributions." More information on the December 2006 report, including how to order it, is available here. |
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| | addressed an audience on February 4th, 2005, at the University of Limerick, Ireland, under the sponsorship of the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre. To learn more about the presentation and see a recent photo (Stan is in the middle), "Is the CMM an impediment to innovation?" and to
get a copy of it or see the video of it (!), visit. |
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| | participated in the August 12, 2004, kick-off of the Software Engineering Institute's International Process Research Consortium; he was invited to be the only
discussant during the opening work session. To learn more about the organization visit the IPRC home page. |
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| Master Systems Inc. ... | |
| | was a donor to honor Prof. Barry Boehm, creator of the Center
for Software Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, by dedicating a conference room
in his name. In our humble opinion, he is one of the true leaders in the field of software engineering, every
subject to which he has turned his attention has become a subfield of our profession. It was a token of our
admiration of Dr. Boehm to contribute in some small way to recognize his impact. To read about the details and see
a recent
photograph of Dr. Boehm click
here. |
This page last updated 6 October 2008.
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