Software, research, and leadership
COAG met on Saturday and decided to invest to implement a national approach to conveyancing – the National Electronic Conveyancing System (NECS). Currently each of Australia’s eight states and territories has its own different system for dealing with the transfer of real estate. You might not think that’s a big deal – after all, wherever …
My University education is in Computer Science, but by professional life and renewed research career is in Software Engineering. A lot of people (and perhaps some University departments!) probably think these are just the same thing, with different names. But in my transition to Software Engineering I’ve discovered they’re very different, and I think their …
I’ve written an article for the latest edition of the CM Journal at CM Crossroads, on Four Lessons about Company Standards and Procedures from Build Management. Writing in a practitioner’s forum is very different to writing academic papers! I’m not sure I’ve completely got the hang of it yet… but it’s fun trying.
A colleague forwarded to me a pointer to the current issue of the ITMPI journal, on Best Practices in Configuration Management. They make an interesting contrast with the best CM practices in the November issue of the CM Journal on “What Best Practice Is Best?”, and specifically the article CM: The Next Generation of Top …
Our paper “An Exploratory Study of Why organisations Do Not Adopt CMMI” has started to be cited in the literature. It’s been in the “hottest 25 downloads” for the journal since it became available 3 quarters ago, so I’m hopeful the number of citations might grow. On one hand, it’s great to cited! On the …
The recent announcement by Somasegar at Microsoft that F# is being “productized” has now started to be picked up by various news agencies. Being productized means some future version of the F# language and its Visual Studio integration will be officially supported by Microsoft. However, I see a couple of people are implying that because …
“Web services” has been a buzz word for so long you might wonder if there’s any buzz left. I’d known in principle about how web service technology was full of goodness, especially for achieving interoperability, but I’d never really taken the red pill. However, recently I had an epiphany. I’ve been working in a team …
Today, version 7.04 (“Feisty Fawn”) of Ubuntu Linux was released. Yay! Earlier this week I installed the Feisty beta release, and rediscovered Linux happiness. I first started using Linux at home in the mid/late 90s, installing Redhat Linux 4 on a second-hand PC. I faithfully followed the Redhat releases, installing Redhat 6 on a new …
Our paper on why companies don’t adopt CMMI is now available online. This paper describes the details of some issues I’ve talked about previously to various industry audiences. In this study, we found that some companies (especially small ones) felt there were barriers to adopting CMMI. For example, often they didn’t get around to considering …
Joe Hurd is in town – he’s been working with some other local researchers on how to verify probabilistic computing systems. We were looking for some place to meet and catch up with each other, so I suggested we go to the Linux Conference Australia 2007 Open Day. It was an interesting afternoon – a …