[Event] Software and Systems Essentials Conference 2008

From April 28-30 the 2nd Software and Systems Essentials Conference 2008 took place in Bern, Switzerland.

An important goal of the conference is bringing together people from business, industry, and academia who are working in software engineering and information technology with its various aspects. Discussions and exchange of experiences between users in public and industrial contexts and vendors of software solutions (regarding software development frameworks) were in the main focus of the event. 

Main topics of the conference were software processes and the exchange of experience on the individual application in various contexts (e.g., in the public application domain), project management regarding systematic systems development processes, and software quality. Among several topics in these areas, I recognized a focus on traceability, i.e., requirements tracing from requirements analysis over design to software code (vertical traceability) and vice versa and linking requirements and specifications to software code and test cases on various levels of abstraction (horizontal traceability). 

We gave a presentation in the track "Testing and Quality Assurance" titled with "QATAM: ein Szenariobasierter Ansatz zur Evaluierung von Qualitätssicherungsstrategien" (D. Winkler, C. Denger, F. Elberzhager, and S. Biffl). This presentation is a result of an ongoing project of TU Vienna and Fraunhofer IESE  in Kaiserslautern, Germany (Institute for Experimental Software Engineering).

Summary of the presentation

 

Efficient development of complex high-quality software system requires systematic planning activities. The selection of an appropriate software process, e.g., the V-Model XT, is a success-critical activity in software development. Software processes define the sequence of steps within a software development project (e.g., what products are required at which milestone). Additionally, constructive and analytical methods support developers in building a product (constructive methods) and verifying/validating  software solutions (analytical methods). 

Nevertheless, resources typically are critical issues in software engineering practice. Thus, an optimal resource planning is required with respect to quality assurance (QA) planning for small- and medium enterprises as well as for large companies. The "Quality Assurance Tradeoff Analysis Method" (QATAM) focuses on the definition and evaluation of quality assurance strategies to enable optimal application of a balanced set of agreed methods along the project life-cycle. The given presentation includes the basic concept of QATAM and illustrates its application with respect to better planning method selection and application regarding a more efficient project execution. 

The slides of our presentation (in german language) are available for download.

The slides of all presentations will be available to the conference participants via the conference website.

Keynotes

Beside presentations and discussions of academic and industry papers, "state of the art" presentations focus on relevant topics for industry and best software engineering practice:

1. E-Government Programm Schweiz – Ein komplexes Programm in einem komplexen System (Peter Fischer, EFD) 
2. From informal process sketches to enactable process: How to represent your development process with SPEM 2.0, Rational Method Composer, and Team Concert  (Peter Haumer, IBM) 
3. Agiles Projektmanagement für große Projekte (Bernd Österreich, OOSE)

Keynote presentations are available on the conference website.

Dietmar Winkler (published and edited by Alexander Schatten)