Software "Best" Practices - Agile Deconstructed

Steven Fraser
Director
Cisco Research Center

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 6:00pm
Engr IV Room 54-134

Abstract
"Best" really depends on context - and this introduction to software "best" practices will focus on the evaluation and integration of the practices that constitute many of today's "Agile" methods. One of the interesting observations made by members of the software community is that "what is old - is new again" when it comes to Agile. Another observation is that "best" is not universally applicable and boundary conditions do apply - due to variations in customers, competition, context, culture, tools, scale and scope - of the systems developed. This talk - intended for researchers, practitioners, managers and educators - does not require any specific programming knowledge and has evolved over the past ten years based on experience gleamed at several multinational organizations developing large software systems.

Bio
Steven Fraser joined Cisco Systems in July 2007 in San Jose, California where he is Director of the Cisco Research Center. Previously, Steven was a senior staff member of Qualcomm's Learning Center in San Diego, California with responsibilities for technical learning. Steven held a variety of engineering roles at Bell Northern Research (BNR) and Nortel including: Process Architect, Senior Manager, Design Process Engineering, and Software Reuse Program Prime at BNR's Computing Research Lab (CRL). In 1994 he spent a year as a Visiting Scientist at the SEI at CMU collaborating on the development of team-based domain analysis (software reuse) techniques. Fraser was the General Chair for XP2006, the Corporate Support Chair for OOPSLA'07 and OOPSLA'08, the Tutorial Co-Chair for both XP2008 and ICSE 2009, and the Special Events Chair for XP2009. Fraser holds a doctorate in Electrical Engineering (software specification validation) from McGill University in Montreal - and is a member of the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE.