Category Archives: Papers

On the Importance of Yerba Mate in the Software Development Process

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mateThis paper will highlight the results of an extensive research conducted since the mid 90′s, on the effects of the consumption of beverages based in the plant known as Ilex paraguariensis, in the framework of software development process activities in South America and some small parts of Europe.

This paper will provide an introduction to the herb commonly referred to as “Yerba Mate”, and will later delve into the advantages and disadvantages of such practice, in the context of the creation of software products.

Introduction

Yerba Mate is defined by Wikipedia as follows:

Yerba mate or yerba-mate (Br.) (Spanish: yerba mate, Portuguese: erva-mate), Ilex paraguariensis, is a species of holly (family Aquifoliaceae) native to subtropical South America in northeastern Argentina, eastern Paraguay and southern Brazil. It was first scientifically classified by Swiss botanist Moses Bertoni, who settled in Paraguay in 1895.

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Slides, slides, slides

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I’ve been doing presentations for a while now, so I decided to open a SlideShare account to publish all the slides I’ve created over the past 5 years. SlideShare has a great Flash-based viewer that you can embed in web pages, so I’ll be using it a lot now. Check out my presentations, feel free to download them and also to use them if you find the contents useful for you (they are distributed with Creative Commons licenses).

Having said that, I’m also announcing that the slides (and sample application) of yesterday’s JAOO geek night presentation in Zürich are also available in the Projects section of this blog, and here goes the SlideShare player with those slides:

iPhone App Development Tips & Tricks (Zürich)

Master

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I’ve sent the final version of my dissertation to the University of Liverpool. I’ve been doing this Master’s degree since 2005, and now it’s over. It feels good and weird at the same time.

Rem 1.0, the final result and main objective of my Master’s thesis work, has been released today. A small, simple, yet extensible and portable UML tool written in C++, using Juce, POCO and SQLite. Not perfect but extensible and small. And that’s what’s great about it.

Dangers of Prototyping

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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. has written about prototypes, saying that they are not only useful but strictly fundamental pieces of the overall software process, as in many other engineering activities. He gives the example of a pilot chemical plant, prepared to process 10’000 units per day instead of the 2 million units a day that the final plant would have to handle, in order to demonstrate the feasibility and uncover some unforeseen problems.

He summarizes his opinion in the famous phrase “plan to throw one away” (Brooks, 1995, page 116), underlining the problem of change management: managing change, right from the beginning of the project, instead of ignoring or avoiding it, is particularly important in software projects, since it presents a solid mindset for all stakeholders in order to avoid scope creep, schedule and staffing problems. Continue reading →

Saving a Failing Project

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In 2006 I had the opportunity to work as a “project leader” into a small failing project. Three developers were working in an ad hoc basis, creating a software application for an important client (a government office in Lausanne), without any kind of detailed formal specification, without any kind of design documentation, and with strong pressure from the management to release the application, even if not in an usable state. Needless to say, the project was also beyond budget.

I had just joined this company a couple of days ago, and the management asked me to take the project in charge. Not an easy task, particularly because it was my first experience of this kind. Continue reading →

Adding Manpower

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Published in 1975, “The Mythical Man-Month” is considered an all-time classic in the software engineering field. The book author, Frederick P. Brooks Jr., used his experience as the project manager of the IBM System/360 and its software, the Operating System/360, to explain a common set of problem patterns, applicable to other software projects as well.

One of the most famous citations in the book is the one regarding the consequences of adding human resources to a late project; this article will provide a couple of thoughts about this assertion, and highlight some contrariwise opinions. Continue reading →

Certification

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While several other professions have a long, established and standard procedure of certification, the title “software engineer” is applied to both self-made developers, turned into experts of some technique, or to people with PhD degrees, and a long history of both academic and professional achievements.

When in some situations it is not legally possible to use the title “software engineer” without an engineering degree of some kind (for example, in some states of the USA or some institutions like the IEEE – http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/titleengineer.html), the term “software developer” is usually applied to people in charge of designing, writing and / or maintaining software-based systems. I will use the terms developer and engineer interchangeably in this discussion, which some people might think is not correct. Continue reading →

Challenges for Software Engineers

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Software Engineering is the youngest of all the professions, being born around 50 years ago, but since then it has been continually improved. Practicers have fiercely debated upon it through the years, given the extremely fast pace of the innovations in the field, and the extremely difficult and inherently dynamic nature of software. Many trends have appeared and vanished, and many others will come.

In this article I will provide a short overview of two kinds of challenges that I consider that software engineers will have to confront in the next 20 years: the human and the technical. Continue reading →