Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 17:11:27 -0500 From: John Pustaver Subject: Software Quality Group Meeting (and book giveaway), Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2000, Turning Around Troubled Software Projects Hi Everyone and Happy Y2K! At this month's meeting, 2 lucky attendees will each receive a copy of the book, Total Quality Management for Software, edited by Gordon Schulmeyer and James McManus. Best wishes, John Pustaver Region I Councilor ASQ Software Division Meeting of the Software Quality Group of New England Meetings of the Software Quality Group are held on the 2nd Wednesday of each month at the facilities of Sun Microsystems, Burlington (Driving directions below). MEETING DAY & DATE: Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2000 TIME: 6:15 PM HEADLINE: Turning Around Troubled Software Projects SPEAKER: Chuck Connell, CHC-3 Consulting MORE INFO: John Pustaver, 978-443-4254, pustaver@swquality.com LOCATION: Sun Microsystems, Burlington (Driving directions below) DESCRIPTION: A lot of attention has been paid lately to long-term, strategic improvements to an organization's software development process. (The CMM from SEI is the most common example.) Long-term improvements are great, but what can you do when a particular software project is in trouble right now? In this case, you don't have the luxury of carefully changing your whole methodology. You have to fix the problem in the next couple weeks. This talk presents a method for turning around software projects that are off track. We describe a way to take a quantitative "snapshot" of a project, which identifies and measures the problem areas. The snapshot then guides the team to focus on the aspects that are most in need of change, and suggests what those changes should be. The quantitative project snapshot and turnaround analysis can be performed quickly, usually in one to five days depending on the size of the project. This allows the organization to make rapid improvements to get a project back on track and progressing efficiently Charles Connell is president of CHC-3 Consulting in Woburn, MA (www.chc-3.com) which helps organizations manage and turn around software projects. Prior to CHC-3, Mr. Connell was a development manager at Lotus, where he helped to create the Notes/Domino product. Mr. Connell teaches software engineering at Boston University and has published widely on software project management, including recent articles in the Boston Globe and Datamation. NEXT MEETING NOTE: The next meeting will be held on Feb 9, 2000: Bob Beach, SQA Engineering: The basics you need to start working with when you are all alone in the lab. 1999 Software Quality Group Calendar Oct. 13, 1999: Mike Sowers, Getting results with Technical Reviews and Inspections through web based automation. Nov. 10, 1999: Anna Allison , Managing for Success: The High Quality Equation Dec. 8, 1999: Test Automation Panel Discussion Jan 12, 2000: Chuck Connell, Turning Around Software Projects That Are Off Track (tentative title) Feb 9, 2000: Bob Beach, SQA Engineering: The basics you need to start working with when you are all alone in the lab. Mar 8, 2000: Valerie Nolan, Configuration Managment topic TBD Apr 12, 2000: Bill Harmon, Meaningful Metrics (tentative title) May 10, 2000: (tentative) Managing the relationships between QA, Dev & Software Product Management Jun 14, 2000: (tentative) EXCEED and other rapid application development models July 12, 2000: Annual Hot Topics Night The Software Quality Group holds monthly meetings. Topics covered at these meetings have included software testing, inspections, ISO 9000, metrics configuration management, and demonstrations of vendor QA tools. There is no charge. The Software Quality Group meets monthly at 6:15pm on the second Wednesday of the month at the facilities of Sun Microsystems, Burlington, MA. Driving directions: From 128/95 Take the Rt. 3 exit heading north (not the Middlesex Turnpike exit if you're coming form the south). From Rt. 3N take the first exit (which is Rt. 62 - Bedford Ave). Turn east toward Burlington. Approximately 0.3 mile after the interchange, turn right onto Network Drive, which leads to the campus on your right. Take the second drive off of Network Drive into the Sun parking lot. Park in the visitor lot and enter the lobby opposite the Sun clock tower. Information about future meetings will be available on the Software Quality Page at http://www.swquality.com/users/pustaver. To be on the email distribution list, send a note to pustaver@swquality.com. The Software Quality Group is cosponsored by Sun Microsystems and the ASQ Software Division and all are welcome. Directors of the Software Quality Group are John Pustaver, Region I Councilor, American Society for Quality, Software Division and Paul Ratty, Sun Microsystems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Software Quality Consulting voice:978-443-4254 fax:978-443-6052 pustaver@swquality.com http://www.swquality.com/users/pustaver