State of the Art

Geocaching

stateofart — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:09:08 +0000

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook and “treasure,” usually toys or trinkets of little value. Today, well over 440,000 geocaches are registered on various websites devoted to the sport. Geocaches are currently placed in 222 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica.

Reverse Engineering

stateofart — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:51:19 +0000

Reverse engineering (RE) is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device or object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation. It often involves taking something (e.g. a mechanical device, an electronic component, a software program) apart and analyzing its workings in detail, usually to try to make a new device or program that does the same thing without copying anything from the original.

TIBCO Rendezvous

stateofart — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:49:53 +0000

TIBCO Rendezvous is a software product that provides a message bus for enterprise application integration (EAI). TIBCO provides messaging APIs in C, C++, Java, Visual BASIC , Perl and .NET to receive data feeds on MS Excel spreadsheets and other applications of choice. The basic message passing is conceptually simple: A message has a single subject composed of elements separated by periods. A message is sent to a single Rendezvous Daemon (though it may end up being broadcast onto Daemons). A listener announces its subjects of interest to a Daemon (with a basic wildcard facility) and messages with matching subjects are delivered to it if the two daemons are ‘connected’ to each other (or indeed the same daemon).

Supply Chain Management

stateofart — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:43:00 +0000

Supply chain management (SCM) is the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the operations of the supply chain as efficiently as possible. Supply Chain Management spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point-of-origin to point-of-consumption. The definition one American professional association put forward is that Supply Chain Management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing, procurement, conversion, and logistics management activities. Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third-party service providers, and customers. In essence, Supply Chain Management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies.

IBM Rational ClearCase UCM

stateofart — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:14:25 +0000

UCM or Unified Change Management is a layer built on Rational ClearCase to provide additional Software Configuration Management features. These changes include integration with ClearQuest to enforce defect and change tracking with code development through the use of activities.

This is part of the Rational Unified Process which describes the lifecycle of change management for IBM Rational’s software development process. It also gives integrators ownership of projects and streams to allow policy and feature management by project leaders and release engineers. UCM removes the ability/requirement that users manage a configuration specification for a view. UCM is used and configured via either CLIs or GUIs.

Productization

stateofart — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:08:06 +0000

The act of modifying something, such as a concept or a tool internal to an organization, to make it suitable as a commercial product. Software architectures which support “productization” well include:

* GUI programs: A user extensible GUI with user supplied call-backs.

* Applications which focus on process flow: Polymorphic relationship between the application core and user defined functionality. The core application framework calls base class pointers to enforce the process flow structure while the user defines functionality in derived class functions. Virtual function definitions in the base class definition enforce the structure of the software design.

* Plug-in architecture: Plug-ins which are added by the application as loadable libraries, allow third parties to add features to the product by conforming to a defined interface. This provides flexible modularity which does not have to be compiled into the final executable. (See YoLinux Tutorial on Libraries and loadable modules.) The benefits of “productiztion” of software are:

1. Bug fixes and enhancements made to the “core” software benefit all derived applications.

2. Lower total cost of software development.

3. A common code base is used by more developers and thus more bugs are discovered and fixed.

4. More developers work on the “core” code and thus improvements and rework are compared and shared.

5. Speedier development of new applications using an application framework or by reconfiguration.

6. Fewer programmers required for code maintenance and bug fixes due to a smaller code base.

In short, the software will have fewer bugs, less money is spent on development, allot less money is spent on maintenance and more capability becomes available in the final application “Productization” is a concept which should be invoked early to avoid the first cloned fork of code. It must be introduced to save some of the projects from an uncontrollable explosion of the size of its corporate code base. Too often management looks only at the single project without looking at the cost savings to the corporate entity. Productization is the process of converting software for re-use into a product others will find useful whether it is for the retail customer or by another group internal to a company. Even when there is no customer or end user, the architectures and principals employed are good coding practices which help its own development and maintenance and also reduce costs.

Quality Assurance

stateofart — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:44:54 +0000

In short, quality assurance checking the quality of the product before it hits the market.

All the planned and systematic activities implemented within the quality system, and demonstrated as needed, to provide adequate confidence that an entity will fulfil requirements for quality.

It is the activity of providing evidence needed to establish confidence among all concerned, that quality-related activities are being performed effectively.
All those planned or systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that a product or service will satisfy given requirements for quality.

Is the name given to the procedures used to ascertain that measurement data are good enough for their intended purpose. It involves 1. quality control: those procedures and activities utilized to verify that the quality control system is operating within acceptable limits and to evaluate the quality of the data; and 2. quality assessment: those procedures and activities utilized to verify that the quality control system is operating within quality assurance.

Quality assurance is a planned and systematic pattern of all actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that the product optimally fulfils customers’ expectations, i.e. that it is problem-free and well able to perform the task it was designed for.

The quality assurance of a commercial product usually involves alpha testing, where an early version of the product is tested at the developer’s site, and is then improved accordingly.

Then, an almost complete version of the product is made available for beta testing by (selected) real users. Faults identified during beta testing should be fixed before the product is released for full scale manufacturing and distribution.

In other words, quality assurance is:

1. All actions taken to ensure that standards and procedures are adhered to and that delivered products or services meet performance requirements.

2. The planned systematic activities necessary to ensure that a component, module, or system conforms to established technical requirements.

3. The policy, procedures, and systematic actions established in an enterprise for the purpose of providing and maintaining a specified degree of confidence in data integrity and accuracy throughout the lifecycle of the data, which includes input, update, manipulation, and output.

Software Engineering

stateofart — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:31:00 +0000

Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software. The term software engineering was popularized during the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference (held in Garmisch, Germany) by its chairman F.L. Bauer, and has been in widespread use since. The discipline of software engineering encompasses knowledge, tools, and methods for defining software requirements, and performing software design, software construction, software testing, and software maintenance tasks. Software engineering also draws on knowledge from fields such as computer engineering, computer science, management, mathematics, project management, quality management, software ergonomics, and systems engineering.

Software Development / Software Development Process

stateofart — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:21:48 +0000

Software development
Software development is the translation of a user need or marketing goal into a software product.
Software development is sometimes understood to encompass the processes of software engineering combined with the research and goals of software marketing to develop computer software products.
This is in contrast to marketing software, which may or may not involve new product development.

Software development process
A software development process is a structure imposed on the development of a software product.
Synonyms include software life cycle and software process.
There are several models for such processes, each describing approaches to a variety of tasks or activities that take place during the process.

What is Six Sigma ?

stateofart — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:17:39 +0000

Six Sigma is a set of practices originally developed by Motorola to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects. A defect is defined as nonconformity of a product or service to its specifications.
While the particulars of the methodology were originally formulated by Bill Smith at Motorola in 1986, Six Sigma was heavily inspired by six preceding decades of quality improvement methodologies such as quality control, TQM, and Zero Defects. Like its predecessors, Six Sigma asserts the following:

Continuous efforts to reduce variation in process outputs is key to business success
Manufacturing and business processes can be measured, analyzed, improved and controlled.

Succeeding at achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management.