Technology Conference
Last week I attended the 2006 Systems & Software Technology Conference in Salt Lake City, UT. The conference is oriented around the defense industry and co-sponsored by the US Navy, US Army, US Air Force, US Marine Corps, and the Defense Information Systems Agency. I spend four days in Salt Lake City, listening to presentations from everything between the overall vision for what improvements need to be made to enhance our national security to detailed software coding techniques. The keynote speakers included Grady Booch and Barry Boehm among others.
Here’s a little bit about the sessions I found the most enlightening:
Java for Large Distributed Real-Time Systems
This session was the most relevant to my current job. At BAE Systems in Minneapolis, I work software for DD(X) which is the next generation destroyer for the US Navy. The DD(X) has recently been named DDG 1000, which is a positive sign that the ship will actually be built. Anyway, information was presented about the use of Java on one of the DDG 1000 weapon systems by En-Kuang Lung from Raytheon. Historically there have been many skeptics about the feasibility of this. Traditional Java with unpredictable garbage collection among other things makes it impossible for use in a system with requirements for real-time responsiveness. The weapon system software we write is all in C++ so it was interesting to hear that a truly real-time system can be produced using Java.
Conflict and Communication
The session by Dr. Randall Jensen and Kasey Thompson from the STSC really hit the nail on the head with regards to identifying some of the most significant problems in the typical software development environment. The point I found most relevant is that communication between people is mostly visual. What this means is that communicating in person is twice as effective as talking over the phone and four or more times effective than using e-mail. These facts in itself are probably not that surprising, but the sad truth is that many organizations spend very little time making sure communication is fluid on development teams. I walked away from this presentation with the feeling that this should be the sole job of management. Management shouldn’t be involved in the technical details of a project and should have an attitude of working for employees to resolve communication problems as quickly as possible. The classic example give is the cubicle farm environment. This environment is horrible for development and tearing down the walls can lead to a much more productive team. This is all easy to say but much harder to do. Hopefully when I find myself in a position to make these changes I remember how I feel sitting in the developer’s chair and become aware of the research communities’ finds on communication of teams.
Measuring Team Effectiveness
Judy Bamberger talked about ways to measure the “touchy feely” aspects of working in a team. She presented a case study were a team measured personal well-being, team growth, authenticity and project alignment. I believe these subjective metrics are very difficult to measure, and probably not the most important ones, however Judy pointed out that “what gets measured gets produced.” So if you want your team to grow, you should attempt to measure team growth. The team becomes more aware of their problems and they have a means of communicating issues which limit the metric from being better. I’ve seen the simple act of taking measurement impact a team’s output and this can be both good and bad, so I found Judy’s case study believable. Do you think “what gets measured gets produced” is true?
Programming UIs using Windows Presentation Foundation
Marc Schweigert from Microsoft presented their next generation user interface programming framework called Windows Presentation Foundation. Despite the fact that WPS is Microsoft-only, I think it does some things very well that other GUI programming options just don’t offer. To me, the two coolest features are:
- Separates UI design from programming logic via XAML
- Vector graphics based – the entire UI is scalable and not based on pixels
Microsoft is also working on WPF/Everywhere which will be a subset of WPF and will run on “any browser and any platform”. I’m not going to hold my breath…but it might be a technology that is worth keeping an eye on.
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