CAI and the IT Metrics & Productivity Institute are proud to present The 2008 Software Best Practices Conference Schedule

Solving the Puzzle of IT Management The 2008 Software Best Practices Conference is about improving the productivity and quality of your entire software development and maintenance organization. It is about leveraging best practice and software process improvement theory in order to achieve dramatic business success. Each conference will feature a full days program of expert speakers who have extensively researched and successfully applied these principles to the development and maintenance of software. Their experiences include annual, double-digit software cost reductions along with corresponding service volume increases and software quality increases. Understand the Theory! Learn From Case Studies! Find Out What Steps You Can Take Right Away! Network with Industry Leaders and Colleagues! You will leave this Conference with a clear, proven approach on how to adapt these lessons to your own IT organization! Back to Top

Program / Agenda

Ed Yourdon

Author and International IT Consultant

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Why Are There Still So Many Level-1 Organizations After Nearly 20 Years?

Many IT executives are tempted by bold, aggressive strategies to leapfrog their organizations from Level-1 on the SEI-CMM scale to a more "acceptable" level of three, or to a more advanced level of four or five; and indeed, it can be done in a relatively short period of time. Yet the more common situation is no progress on the SEI-CMM scale, i.e. organizations that were firmly entrenched at Level-1 in the early 1990s are still there 15 years later. In this presentation, Ed Yourdon describes the fundamental financial, cultural, and political barriers to SEI-CMM improvement, and provides realistic strategies for overcoming them. Once these initiatives are put in place, a series of "tactical" initiatives can be launched to rapidly improve the organization's software process in order to rapidly climb up the SEI-CMM scale.

Ed Yourdon is an internationally-recognized computer consultant, as well as the author of over 500 technical articles and 27 books, including "Byte Wars" , "Managing High-Intensity Internet Projects", "Death March", "Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer", and "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer." His latest book, "Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race", discusses both current and future trends in offshore outsourcing, and provides practical strategies for individuals, small businesses, and the nation to cope with this unstoppable tidal wave.

Dr. Bill Curtis

Senior Vice President & Chief Scientist of Cast Software

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The Business Value of Application Software Quality

IT executives are continually pressured to prove the business value of their applications and costs. This talk will explore how continual vigilance toward an application's quality improves its business value and reduces its lifetime costs. The talk will begin by describing six trends that are accelerating the importance of application software quality. Next it will argue that based on these trends defining quality as the removal of defects is not sufficient to enable an application to achieve its full business impact and value. Different sources of business value will be related to different aspects of software quality such as robustness, maintainability, security, and other such measures. A more comprehensive definition of software quality will be derived from these factors that can be related to international standards such as ISO 9126. Next the talk will discuss the processes that need to be deployed in order to address the application software quality issues that most affect business value. These processes will be discussed in terms of the maturity of the application development organization as well as how quality roles can be incorporated into the existing structure of application development and maintenance functions. Case studies will be used to demonstrate how application quality issues have been addressed by best practice companies and the business benefits they achieved.

Bill Curtis is Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist with Cast Software, a leader in providing technology for measuring and evaluating application software quality. He co-authored the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), the People CMM, and the Business Process MM. Until its acquisition by Borland he was Co-founder and Chief Scientist of TeraQuest, the global leader in providing CMM-based services. He is a former Director of the Software Process Program in the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining the SEI, Dr. Curtis worked for MCC, ITT's Programming Technology Center, GE Space Division, and taught statistics at the University of Washington. He has published four books, over 150 articles, and was recently elected a Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to software process improvement and measurement.

Capers Jones

Chief Scientist Emeritus of Software Productivity Research, Inc. (SPR) and Author

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Analysis of New Technologies

The software industry is extremely active in developing new methodologies and technologies. Many of these are effective, but some are not. This presentation by Capers Jones uses a standard analytic approach for evaluating the effectiveness of new and emerging technologies on software development productivity, software maintenance productivity, and software quality. The current version of this presentation uses recent data to analyze Agile development, extreme programming, the ITIL library, SCRUM sessions, Watts Humphrey's Team Software Process (TSP) and Personal Software Process (PSP), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Six-Sigma for Software. These technologies are evaluated on the basis of the 12 known ways that software projects can be improved. The evaluation method also includes analysis of the optimal size ranges of the projects for using the technology: 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 function points. In addition, the evaluation method presentation discusses the suitability of the technologies for six types of software project: information technology (IT) projects, systems software, embedded software, commercial software, outsourced software, web software, and ERP-class projects. Recent productivity and quality data is included.

Capers Jones is Chief Scientist Emeritus of Software Productivity Research (SPR). Mr. Jones is the designer of several software cost and quality estimation tools including SPQR/20™, the first commercial software estimating tool to use function points as the basis for sizing source code and other deliverables such as specifications and user documents. He is also an international consultant on software management topics, a speaker, a seminar leader, and a prolific author. As an author, Mr. Jones has written 14 books including his best seller "Applied Software Measurement: Assuring Productivity and Quality." His most recent book is "Estimating Software Costs."

Tony Salvaggio

President, Computer Aid, Inc. (CAI) and Founder, IT Metrics & Productivity Institute

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History and Future of Software Development

Software process improvement is not just about the upside and the enormous return on investment. It is about our basic survival in an increasingly competitive global IT environment. In this presentation, Tony Salvaggio provides an historic overview of the manufacturing revolution and he explains how many of the initiatives to come out of this transformational shift in manufacturing are precisely the same initiatives that we will need to undertake within IT over the next 5-10 years. Topics covered will be productivity, standard process initiatives, metrics based management, and the importance of standard estimating.

Anthony (Tony) Salvaggio is CEO and President of Computer Aid (CAI), an international IT outsourcing firm that is currently managing active engagements with over one hundred Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies around the world. CAI employs over 2000 associates across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Mr. Salvaggio founded CAI in 1981 and for the past 25 years, CAI has been leveraging the lessons of manufacturing in their development and maintenance of software. Prior to founding CAI, Mr. Salvaggio spent 22 years at IBM. In 2003, Mr. Salvaggio was a recipient of Ernst & Young's "Entrepreneur of the Year" award. In 2004, he founded the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute.

Vic Basili

Director, Fraunhofer Center, Univ. of Maryland

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Building and Using Corporate Intellectual Property in the Software Domain

Software development is often viewed as a research and development activity rather than a competence area that needs to be nurtured, packaged, and evolved as part of an organization's intellectual property. Such a mind set requires a different paradigm, one in which we can capture, analyze and synthesize experiences and then provide project support based upon what the organization has learned to date. In this presentation, Dr. Vic Basili discusses how this approach is reflected in the Goal/Question/Metric Paradigm, the Quality Improvement Paradigm and the Experience Factory Organization. These models are based on the need for measurement and feedback loops, from product to process and project to project. The end goal is the creation of a learning organization for building software competencies.

Dr. Vic Basili is a former Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Center-Maryland for Experimental Software Engineering. He was also one of the Founders and Principals in the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL). Dr. Basili was instrumental in transforming software engineering into an empirical science and was an early pioneer in the integration of processes, techniques, methods and tools into the practice of developing software. By applying the scientific method to the software engineering domain, Vic Basili developed concepts like the Goal-Question-Metric method, the Quality-Improvement paradigm, and the Experience-Factory approach to help bring a sense of order to the ad-hoc development so prevalent in the software engineering field.

Bob Charette

President, ITABHI Corporation

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Integrating Risk and Measurement: Creating a Future from Present Decisions

Managing risk is not about making future decisions, but crafting the future from present decisions. To create the best possible future from the decisions that presently confront us, we must know where we are, how we got here, and where we are going - something that measurement, when integrated with risk management, can tell us.

Dr. Robert Charette is the President of the ITABHI Corporation, an international high technology company involved in enterprise and program risk management consulting. He is the author of over 80 articles on software, systems, and business management in addition to the following books: "Software Engineering Environments: Concepts and Technology" (1986), "Software Engineering Risk Analysis & Management" (1989), "Applications Strategies for Risk Analysis" (1990), "Introduction to the Management of Risk" (1994, "A Unified Methodology for Systems Development" (1987) and "Decision Empowerment: A Parent's Guide to Raising Good Decision Makers' (2007). Several new books on managing enterprise risk are in progress.

Donald Reifer

President, RCI

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Making Business Sense of your Measurement Data

Most organizations capture lots of metrics and measurement data. Unfortunately, few managers know how to use it to influence business decisions. For example, how do they know when they tested enough? As another example, how do you quantify risk and make sense of it? To emphasize these points, Don Reifer will focus on how to use metrics and measurement data to make decisions at the project and enterprise levels that make business sense.

Don Reifer is an internationally-recognized software consultant. During his over 38 years in the software field, he has served as a consultant, built businesses, managed major projects, led recovery teams, served on red and greybeard teams, prepared proposals and served in executive positions in both industry and government. He has also served as a Visiting Associate at the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at the University of Southern California.Don has published more than one hundred papers and seven books. His many awards include the AIAA Software Engineering Award, the Frieman Award and the Secretary of Defense's Medal for Outstanding Public Service.

Bob Lawhorn

Chief Technology Officer, Computer Aid (CAI)

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Transforming IT Management to Achieve Dramatic Business Success

There are three main challenges that organizations getting started with a software process improvement program frequently face: 1) how to develop a workable method for gathering the metrics needed; 2) how to conduct meaningful analysis on that data, despite the fundamental comparison problems that arise across projects, teams, and technologies; and 3) how to institutionalize and market such a program so that it will overcome the inevitable resistance of an organization's various constituents. In this presentation by Bob Lawhorn, CTO of CAI, an automated approach to data collection is outlined that can address these challenges, at both a technological and a cultural level, while at the same time institutionalizing standard processes throughout an organization so that the data we wind up with, in the end, can be analyzed in a meaningful and consistent manner.

Bob Lawhorn has over 40 years of experience in software development, software measurement, and software project estimation. He spent his first twenty years at Bethlehem Steel working on applications related to steel, mining, and ship building and his next twenty years at CAI, where he is credited with the invention of CAI's application development methodologies and fixed price estimating matrices. Bob is currently CTO of CAI where he spends most of time consulting with companies and government agencies on how to implement application development best practices within their own organizations.

Tim Lister

Principal, Atlantic Systems Guild

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We Need It by October: What's Your Estimate?

It is a cardinal sin of management to let good estimates, made by informed people, be overwhelmed by the strong desires of powerful people. Accurate estimates are the foundation of all critical decisions regarding staffing, functionality, delivery date, and budget.

How do we properly estimate in a world where tradition declares that the deadline is set before requirements are even known? In this presentation, Tim Lister will offer practical advice on dealing with this thorny issue. He will present strategies and tactics for project estimating and will describe his favorite estimating metric, the Estimating Quality Factor (EQF).

Tim Lister is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc. He is presently involved in assisting organizations with IT risk management and in tailoring methodologies and selecting tools for software development groups to increase project productivity and product reliability. He is also pursuing work on metrics for making the efforts of software projects more predictable. Mr. Lister is the co-author of "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" as well as "Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects."

David Rasmussen

President, Stratner LLC

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The Business of Software Maintenance

Too often, software maintenance is considered to be an after-thought, the last phase of product development. But should it be? Should maintenance be considered a tactical or strategic asset? This presentation with David Rasmussen will examine these, and other, considerations and offer suggestions for improving the business value of this vital function.

David N. Rasmussen is president and founder of Stratner Company LLC. Stratner is focused on helping clients improve their strategic business practices. The company's portfolio of services includes strategic consulting, executive coaching, training and education. Repetitive Innovation, a Stratner business practice, is focused on achieving improved quality of repetitive work. Mr. Rasmussen is an adjunct professor of business at Northeastern University and a lecturer in the Whittemore School of Business at the University of New Hampshire.

David Herron

Founder, The David Consulting Group

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Effective Measures for Project Managers

Project Managers have many responsibilities ranging from managing customer expectations to directing internal resources towards a successful software build. But their primary goal is to design, develop and deploy software on time, on budget and with a high degree of quality. The key to successfully managing a project is to have an effective set of measures. Equipped with the right set of measures, project managers can properly set expectations and maintain greater control over their deliverables. Measuring and managing the size, the quality and the speed with which the solution is delivered is key to achieving the desired outcome.

David Herron is a Founder of the David Consulting Group. During the past ten years he has served as a consultant to Fortune 1000 companies in the areas of software metrics, software process improvement and applications outsourcing management. He is an acknowledged authority in the measurement and estimation of software productivity and quality, specializing in the determination of software project size, effort and cost. His engagements have supported clients on the use of metrics to monitor the impact of IT on the business, on the advancement of IT organizations to higher levels on the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model and on the governance of offshore outsourcing arrangements. Mr. Herron is also the author, along with David Garmus, of "Function Point Analysis: Measurement Practices for Successful Software Projects."

Ian Brown

Booz Allen Hamilton

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10 Habits of Highly Effective Measurement Programs

Accurately measuring product quality and process capabilities is challenging in any software organization. Most organizations do not attempt any real measurement at all, and the ones that do often fail miserably. In this presentation, Ian Brown presents ten keys to measurement success, including: devising measurements directly related to articulated business goals; automating measurement collection tools, and integrating measurement into the process.

Ian Brown, a senior associate with Booz Allen Hamilton, leads the firm's Quantitative Software Analysis capability. He has 8 years of experience in software measurement and analysis, CMM/CMMI, and goal-question-metric (GQM) implementation. Ian was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Function Point Users Group (IFPUG) in 2004 and serves as the Secretary and Director of Communications and Marketing. Ian is a Certified Function Point Specialist (CFPS) and has earned a bachelors degree from Cornell University and a master degree in public policy from Harvard University. He has worked closely with the firm's Earned Value Management (EVM) capability to integrate software measurement concepts with EVM and is currently implementing the approach on a large maintenance and enhancement task at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Bob Wysocki

Founder, Enterprise Information Insights

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How to Establish a World Class PMO

This presentation by Dr. Robert Wysocki will prepare you with an understanding of what a PMO is, what they do, how they are structured and placed in the organization, and the steps to follow to establish a PMO. You will leave this briefing fully prepared to take on the challenges of establishing a PMO in your organization.

Robert K. Wysocki, Ph.D., has over 40 years experience as a project management consultant and trainer, information systems manager, systems and management consultant, author, training developer and provider. He has written fourteen books on project management and information systems management. Bob has developed more than 20 project management courses and trained over 10,000 project managers. In 1990 he founded Enterprise Information Insights, Inc. (EII), a project management consulting and training practice specializing in project management methodology design and integration, project support office establishment, the development of training curriculum and the development of a portfolio of assessment tools focused on organizations, project teams and individuals.

Carl Pritchard

Founder, Pritchard Management Associates

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Math Free Risk Management

Risk management is often seen as a deep mystery wrapped in higher mathematics. In this presentation, Carl Pritchard will examine the non-mathematical aspects of risk, and the importance of using qualitative, rather than quantitative practices to generate an organizational culture that effectively communicates and resolves risks.

Carl Pritchard is the principal and founder of Pritchard Management Associates (PMA). He is a recognized lecturer, author, researcher, and instructor. He is the lead chapter author for risk management in the 4th Edition of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, the ANSI standard for project management. His work as an instructor has taken him around the world, training with some of the leading international training organizations, as well as for private clients and the Project Management Institute®. He has presented at each of the last 13 North American Project Management Institute Symposia and Congresses. He is the U.S. Correspondent for the U.K. project management journal, Project Manager Today.

Dan Galorath

President, Galorath, Inc.

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Reducing Total Cost of Ownership: Measuring and Managing New and Legacy Software

Most organizations tend to apply the greatest measurement rigor in the early states of software development and deployment. Software innovation is interesting and exciting, and awareness of cost, schedule, and resource risks is high. And in fact, management should focus on measurement during software development and deployment. But measuring and addressing software performance is equally critical - if not as glamorous - once software has become established and entrenched in an organization. While legacy software doesn't wear out like a car tire, it can degrade over time with the accumulation of numerous patches, system and configuration changes, provisioning and re-provisioning, integrations, and ongoing software development. Over time, this accumulation of changes can lead to software instability and a significant increase in the cost of maintaining legacy systems - up to four times the cost of initial software development according to some estimates. The fact is that pro-active measurement and management (software "well care") is critical throughout the software lifecycle and can significantly decrease total cost of ownership. In this session we will discuss the art and science of information-based performance measurement throughout the software lifecycle, including design for maintainability, development of measurement criteria, collection of metrics, and industry standards, guidelines, and best practice options.

Dan Galorath is one of the principal developers of the SEER-SEM™ software evaluation model. His teaching experience includes development and presentation of courses in Software Cost, Schedule, and Risk Analysis; Software Management; Software Engineering; and Weapons Systems Architecture. His company, Galorath Incorporated, has developed tools, methods, and training for software cost, schedule, risk analysis, and management decision support. Among Mr. Galorath's published works are papers encompassing software cost modeling, testing theory, software life cycle error prediction and reduction, and software and systems requirements definition. Most recently, Mr. Galorath was named winner of the 2001 International Society of Parametric Analysts (ISPA) Freiman Award. awarded to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the theoretical or applied aspects of parametric modeling. Dan is also the author of "Software Sizing, Estimation, and Risk Management."

Mike Harris

President, The David Consulting Group

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Herb Krasner

Founder, Software Quality Institute and Lead CMM Assessor

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The Projected Impact of the CMMI in the World of IT

The CMMI provides guidance on how to gain control of software/systems development and maintenance processes. In this presentation by Dr. Herb Krasner, the CMMI suite, their applications in industry, and reported results of CMMI guided improvement programs will be explored. The speaker will also discuss the impact of the model's future evolution in the broader IT domain.

Dr. Herb Krasner is a senior faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Director of the Software Engineering Industry Affiliates Program. He is best known for his leading edge work on modeling the costs of software quality, reporting the ROI data for software process improvement, coaching organizational improvement programs and reporting the results from his empirical studies of professional programmers. He has published over 55 papers, articles and book sections and has been lead CMM assessor on over 40 CMM capability assessments.

Each event will showcase 4-5 speakers. All speakers subject to change.

The best opportunity this year to learn how to dramatically increase the effectiveness of your ENTIRE software organization.

Fall 2008 Schedule

Baton Rouge, LA

Thursday NOV 20, 2008

Baton Rouge Marriott
5500 Hilton Avenue
Baton Rouge, LA 70808
Tel: 225-924-5000

Chicago, IL

Tuesday nov 13, 2008

Hyatt Regency McCormick Place
2233 South Martin L. King Drive
Chicago, Illinois, USA 60616-9985
Tel: 312-567-1234

Detroit, MI

Thursday OCT 16, 2008

Hyatt Regency Dearborn
600 Town Center Drive
Dearborn, Michigan 48126
Tel: 313-593-1234

Miami, FL

Thursday OCT 23, 2008

Miami Marriott South Beach
161 Ocean Drive
Miami Beach, FL 33139
Tel: 305-536-7700

New York, NY

Thursday OCT 30, 2008

New York Marriott East Side
525 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Tel: 212-755-4000

Philadelphia, PA

Thursday Nov 6, 2008

Park Hyatt Philadelphia at the Bellevue
200 S Broad St
Philadelphia, PA 19102
Tel: 215-893-1234

Pittsburgh, PA

Tuesday Sep 9, 2008

Renaissance Pittsburgh Hotel
107 6th Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
Tel: 412-562-1200

Tampa, FL

Tuesday OCT 21, 2008

Hyatt Regency Tampa
211 North Tampa Street
Tampa, Florida, USA 33602
Tel: 813-225-1234

Toronto, ON

wednesday OCT 1, 2008

Toronto Park Hyatt
4 Avenue Road
Toronto, Ontario M5R 2E8
Canada
Tel: 416-925-1234

Special Event
Melbourne ,
Australia

FRiday nov 14, 2008

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Spring 2009 Schedule

Albany, NY

Tuesday MAR 31, 2009

Detroit, MI

Tuesday APR 21, 2009

New York, NY

Tuesday May 5, 2009

Orlando, FL

Tuesday Mar 10, 2009

Philadelphia, PA

Tuesday May 19, 2009

Princeton, NJ

thursday Mar 19, 2009

Rochester, NY

Tuesday JUNE 2, 2009

Tallahassee, FL

Tuesday APRIL 28, 2009

Tampa, FL

Thursday MAY 14, 2009

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Fall 2009 Schedule

Baltimore, MD

Tuesday OCT 6, 2009

Chicago, IL

Tuesday Sep 22, 2009

Miami, FL

Tuesday nov 17, 2009

New York, NY

Tuesday sep 29, 2009

Philadelphia, PA

Tuesday oct 20, 2009

Toronto, Canada

Tuesday sep 15, 2009

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Registration

Registration Fee

Register now to ensure a seat in the 2008 Software Best Practices Conference.

The fee for conference is $695.

The conference is free to executives and managers in Federal and State government agencies. Official government identification must be presented at event registration.

Your registration fee covers attendance at all sessions of the Software Best Practices Conference, breakfast, breaks and lunch.

How to Register in the US

Click one of the registration links above or call by phone at: (610) 530-5225

How to Register in the UK

Special Needs

Please notify the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute help desk at (610) 530-5225 or by email at events@itmpi.org at least one week before the event if the registrant has special dietary needs or other requirements.

Contact Us

Additional Information

Please note that all webinars are conducted from the United States. Therefore, anyone trying to access the telephone dial-in phone number will have to use the appropriate country code. For additional information on the Conference or the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute please contact us at:

IT Metrics and Productivity Institute
1390 Ridgeview Drive
Allentown, PA 18104
(610) 530-5225 phone
(610) 530-5293 fax
events@itmpi.org

About the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute

The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute is an organization founded by CAI to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute seeks to accomplish its mission through the promotion of best practices in the areas of Process, Metrics, Estimation, and IT Governance. Through the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute, CAI is able to share with the industry the process management insights they have acquired from over 25 years of experience serving Fortune 1000 and public sector clients.

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World Wide Conferences

The 2008 Software Best Practices Conferences are the most important software process improvement events for IT executives in 2008. They provide educational insight and networking opportunities for IT executives and managers who need to continually expand their technology knowledge base while remaining up-to-date on innovative products and services.If you are interested in sponsoring the 2008 Software Best Practices Conference, please contact:

Michael Milutis
Executive Director
IT Metrics and Productivity Institute
1390 Ridgeview Drive
Allentown, PA 18104
(610) 530-5141

Sponsorship Opportunities

If you are interested in sponsoring the 2008 Software Best Practices Conferences, please click here to download our sponsorship package.

Or contact:

Michael Milutis
Executive Director
IT Metrics and Productivity Institute
1390 Ridgeview Drive
Allentown, PA 18104
(610) 530-5141

Our Sponsors