Software excellence goes beyond mere technical ideals and measures. Software, as with all information technology (IT), must serve and enable the business, and must do so cost effectively. This establishes the context, boundaries, and rationale for any meaningful measure of software excellence. But how do companies attain such business-oriented software excellence?

Framed in the context of global change, market forces, and technology advance, this presentation explores our understanding and misconceptions regarding the role of software in enabling and automating business. We examine often used and misused terminology including: technology, information technology, architecture, and enterprise architecture. We also observe case study successes and failures in creating software solutions.

This presentation describes how enterprise architecture aligns IT with the business strategy and optimizes IT investments; providing the context, rationale, and boundaries for software excellence. It explains the essential enterprise architecture mechanisms for generating value, achieving alignment, and attaining business-oriented software excellence. The provided checklist allows you to gauge how well your company utilizes enterprise architecture, and recommends specific action steps you can take to help your company get more from its software investments.

In an Agile workplace it certainly seems that extroverts have the run of the roost. It’s loud. It’s interaction-intensive. It’s focused on rapid results. As an introvert you can end up feeling excluded, overlooked, or simply frustrated. What should you do?

We will explore how knowledge and awareness of your own Myers-Briggs personality types can help you understand the interactions & friction you are experiencing with your teammates. We will then delve into Jennifer Kahnweiler’s “Four Ps” (Preparation, Presence, Push, Practice) as one method of mitigating these difficulties.

The law of bureaucracy exists in any organization. The larger the organization, the stronger the law.

Examples of this law, in a business organization, would be those who work and sacrifice to bring value to the customer, versus those who work to protect policy, process, and procedures (regardless of use or value). The Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Top-down organizations are suffering from the worst case of egoism: When each person acts to create the greatest good for himself or herself. When the organization and its employees make decisions merely to achieve individual goals (at the expense of others), they lose sight of the original vision or goal. The law of bureaucracy can be broken through team empowerment and altruism: From this perspective, one may be called on to act in the interests of others, even when it runs contrary to his or her own self-interests.

This talk will introduce ten characteristics of servant-leadership to help those who currently manage others to break the law of bureaucracy.

Conventional RFPs are poor at identifying the best vendor for a project. By concentrating on project details and costs, they often miss the vital issues relevant to selecting the best vendor. This talk will provide a concrete alternative and a sample document to improve your vendor selection results.

This is a panel comprised of leaders of small software development and design firms. They are: Kevin Taylor, Obtiva; Carl Erickson, Atomic Object; Cliff Wegner, Mighty in the Midwest; John Hwang, Mutually Human; Joe Johnston, Universal Mind. We’ll have a few questions “in the bag” to get things going but primarily will take questions from the audience. Questions could be things like “how do you hire the best people”, “how should firms select a vendor”, “what’s your single most effective project management practice”, “fixed bid vs time & materials”, etc.

Have you been assigned to an Enterprise software product that is already in production, written by someone who is long gone, and which has more reported bugs than there are snowflakes in a Grand Rapids winter? Have you seen software that is so old and so central to business processes that no one dares touch it for fear of unpredictable consequences? Or maybe you have had to work with software in production without the existing source code? This presentation is about finding happy endings to development horror stories. Its goal is to bring you into the world of the full development product cycle and reveal fundamental laws related to software development. These laws will apply regardless of what methodology you or your company uses: Waterfall, Agile, RUP, nothing, everything, etc.

Trust, cooperation, leadership, humility, and some thick skin are all elemental to the alchemy of successful design pairing. Together Paul Hart and Samuel Bowles will explore their successes and failures in design pairing together since the late 90s. Their observations will be rooted in their day-to-day project work and explained through specific stories and experiences working for Atomic Object as well as their previous agency work together and apart.

Enterprises are known to be slow-moving beasts; governments are the largest of all enterprises. Recently part of the U.S. Department of Defense hired us to instruct and tutor some of their employees in test-driven development and other Agile methodologies.

Development during the training course was done strictly in C, but utilized Ruby and other tools, like Cucumber, to provide high-level goals for the students to pursue. As students developed their C programs (using test-driven development with unit tests, of course), they also had a set of Cucumber features to test their programs against. As their applications became more and more complete, they began passing more and more Cucumber tests.

In this talk, I’ll describe the system test harness that drove the students’ progression through the course. We’ll explore the usefulness of Cucumber in defining high-level system tests for a test-driven development training course. I’ll conclude by reflecting on how Ruby and Cucumber’s versatility allows us to introduce system testing into any environment, from embedded to enterprise, even when the application under development is built from different technologies.

Error handling code can be quite ugly, difficult to test, and difficult to maintain. The idea of an exception is a potent tool for streamlining error handling. Some languages such as C have no native support for exception handling. CException is a library for adding basic exception handling to C and is suitable for all application development including embedded systems.

Using private development and also work under an SBIR grant, we have developed a prototype ARINC 653 implementation using the virtualization technology of the open-source Xen hypervisor along with a Linux-based domain/partition OS. We recently released the first component of our approach into the open source Xen community — with much more in the works. In this presentation, we will share lessons learned from adding an ARINC 653 CPU-scheduler to Xen, discuss our plans for dealing with interrupt and I/O models, and address the business challenges of working with the diffuse group that forms an open source development community. We will close with some of our ideas for build, configuration, and certification tools that must simultaneously address technical, political, and business realities.

In the late Fall of 2004, at Ford Motor Company, a team of Perl/CGI developers was chartered to implement a robust 80 table application using the J2EE platform with the assistance of a one Java consultant and an impossible deadline. What began as a single project challenge emerged as an enterprise evolution as Ford subsequently embraced distributed development in a big way. Join with Marvin as a recounts over five years of false starts, frustrations, and eventual successes as one of the world’s largest corporations transformed application development across four continents.

This session will explore the development of LECO’s most recent generation of scientific software. We will cover the various aspects that were involved in bringing the software from concept to market, including:

• The process of management buy-in
• Hiring and working with rich application interface design contractors
• Transitioning existing C++/MFC developers to write C#/WPF code and hiring new talent.
• Using Agile practices for efficiency, transparency and quality
• Rolling out the new product in a series of sprints, while retaining competitive secrecy

Parallel programming is hard. It’s difficult to look at a piece of code and grok how 32 instances of it running simultaneously will behave. However, as the hardware industry shifts towards multi-core and manycore processors, the key to high-performance applications is parallelism. The .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 offer solutions to make coding, debugging, and profiling concurrent applications significantly easier. In this talk, we’ll examine Parallel LINQ-to-Objects (PLINQ), the Task Parallel Library (TPL), new coordination and synchronization types, and Visual Studio tooling support in order to provide a look at the next generation of parallel programming with .NET.

If you build or buy enterprise software, you know that even with the most painstakingly-detailed requirements documentation and most adroitly-lawyered scope of work, your project is still exposed to risk. The product you ship may meet or even exceed the functional requirements you defined for it, and may pass all manner of QA processes and still not succeed with customers. Other projects that seemed doomed from the first napkin doodle and which were scoped on the same napkin end up succeeding. Why? How can we know with more certainty (and repeatability) that the products we’re building and the user experiences that result from their use will be good? In this 40 minute talk, Dan presents three critical concepts from the discipline of Information Architecture that software developers and business stakeholders alike can apply to their work immediately to attain results that not only look good, but which are good.

When the development of theory out-paces data, Researchers and Information Workers often find that new ideas cannot be tested for lack of tools or technology. Researchers in active areas of science in addition to corporate Information Workers face a different challenge: Gathering data is so easy and quick that it exceeds our capacity to validate, analyze, visualize, store, and curate the information. This talk addresses this challenge and the opportunity it presents.

We as technologists, software engineers and database experts need to recognize these new challenges and allow researchers and Information Workers to facilitate what we might call open source innovation, in which advances have a sociotechnical component. Individual labs and projects will routinely reach beyond their walls, and organizations will strive to create and sustain collaborative, distributed networks of investigators. In this talk we will look at what are the challenges and possible paths that can lead to fostering innovation that will be needed as a core organizational value.

The Fourth Paradigm book which the talk will draw from is dedicated to and reflects the vision of the late Jim Gray of Microsoft Research, who envisioned a world of scholarly resources text, databases, and any other associated materials that were seamlessly navigable and interoperable. Gray loved sailing. Sailors, of course, guide a vessel by reacting to the nearest swell and wave. But the ocean also affords a chance to scan the horizon in anticipation of the future, to see what’s ahead and imagine what’s just out of view. The talk will give attendees a glimpse of the horizon for all technologists and, at their best, a peek at what lies beyond. It’s a journey well worth taking.

You’ve seen the acronyms: IaaS, SaaS, PaaS. You’ve heard the hype. Now you want to have a better idea of what is cloud computing beyond something available through the internet. This presentation is for managers and business people who want to know the basics of cloud computing and its advantages.

In the last year, Interlochen has moved from an antique on-premise ERP / CRM solution to two cloudy solutions: Enrollment Rx for admissions to both our prestigious summer camp and arts academy, and Convio Common Ground for our advancement and fundraising departments. Both of these solutions run on Salesforce.com, a delivery model that is providing significant financial and time savings for our IT organization along with process improvements for our business units. We also adopted Google Apps for email, document collaboration, enterprise calendaring, and IM / chat, migrating away from an on-premise Microsoft Exchange environment. We’ll provide an overview of how these efforts to move to the cloud have benefited our institution as well as the problems we overcame in an effort to save others the same heartaches — or to at least prepare them better for similar challenges.

Conference attendees will be provided with real life examples of Windows Azure and SQL Azure deployments, along with cost analysis scenarios, and demonstrations of migration and deployment strategies. Detailed explanations will be used to explore how the Azure platform changes the process of staging, testing, deploying and maintaining an application or database.

Attendees will be challenged to consider Azure as a replacement for on premise hosting of SQL Server and Web applications. The similarities between Azure and on premise tools will be highlighted by demonstrating Remote Desktop to Azure, full access to IIS, and deployment directly from Visual Studio.

Deployment examples will include a SQL Azure database, an ASP.NET Website, and a WordPress website utilizing PHP on Azure. The migration of an existing MS SQL Server database to SQL Azure will be demonstrated as time allows.

The concept of the mobile device is changing. Gone are the days where the sole excpectation for a cellular device was to make calls. Modern devices are becoming increasingly integral in society as the permeation of the smart phone continues to increase. As developers, the expectation for us to embrace this new trend is essential. Among the popular platforms, Google’s Android stands to offer the fastest growing audience and most open choice for app developers. Learn why mobile programming is all the rage and gain a solid understanding for the basics of Android programming

You don’t need to develop in Java with the Android SDK in order to develop Android applications! With Air for Android, developers can harness the power of Flex and Flash to develop native applications for Android devices. Share code between desktop, web and mobile apps! Use higher-level constructs available in the Flex framework for beautiful interactions in less time and money. You can even share your code to develop iPhone and Blackberry Playbook apps! In this code-focused session, you will learn all about the development story for Air and Mobile Flex. There will be plenty of demos of both code and tooling.