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Swe04
Software engineering in the news. Add links to news items relevant to software engineering to this page.

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-----++++ 2004-07-16

[[http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&sid=56128][Review]] of Alan Cooper's book 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity', which argues that software design should be driven by analysis of user needs.

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-----++++ 2004-07-13

[[http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1610398,00.asp]["The New Geek"]]

PC Magazine (07/13/04); Lohr, Steve

A new breed of IT professional is emerging, one with a technical background who can channel his skills into multiple disciplines: These so-called "New Geeks" are expected to help usher in what IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger calls the "post-technology" era, in which technology tools are applied to business and societal problems rather than to the tools themselves. The technologies with the most potential are designed to bypass institutional barriers and traditional hierarchies to communicate, share data, and automate transactions, and such technologies include more advanced social networking, speech recognition and natural-language programs, search software, virtual-team software, and intelligent agents to help reduce the complexity of e-commerce. This trend is expected to lead to higher productivity levels, economic growth, and standards of living. The New Geek movement is also reflected in the growth of interdisciplinary programs in the computer science departments of major universities. Meanwhile, analysts expect microprocessors, memory, communications speeds, and hard drive storage to continue to improve exponentially over the next decade. Professor Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT's Sloan School of Management remarks that tech investments by themselves offer little in terms of productivity, but combining them with specific work practices produces the largest gains. The best-performing firms employ teams more frequently than their competitors, and follow a model in which easily quantifiable work is centralized and computerized while tasks that require interpersonal skills and local knowledge are decentralized. New Geeks will be optimally positioned to design and implement such tech-driven enhancements, and Brynjolfsson says the people most likely to benefit in the new global labor market will be those who can find and create innovative tech applications.

Source: [[http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2004-6/0712m.html#item16][ACM Technews]]

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-----++++ 2003-11-20

The underlying theory of project management is obsolete. In prior literature, it has been generally seen that there is noexplicit theory of project management. We contend that it ispossible to precisely point out the underlying theoreticalfoundation of project management as espoused in the PMBOK Guideby PMI and mostly applied in practice. This foundation can bedivided into a theory of project and a theory of management. We linktheories to the body of knowledge by comparing prescriptions derivedfrom theory to prescriptions presented in the PMBOK.Secondly, we show, by a comparison to competing theories and by ananalysis of anomalies (deviations from assumptions or outcomes asimplied in the body of knowledge) observed in project managementpractice, that this foundation is obsolete and has to be substitutedby a wider and more powerful theoretical foundation.
Lauri Koskela, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finl and Gregory Howell, Lean Construction Institute

http://www.leanconstruction.org/pdf/ObsoleteTheory.pdf

Source: [[http://mailman.wirehub.nl/mailman/listinfo/senieuws][se-nieuws]]

---------------------------------------
-----++++ 2003-09-21 

[[http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22281.html][Newsfactor]] 
and 
[[http://www.nature.com/nsu/030623/030623-6.html][Nature]] 
report on an article by 
Damien Challet and Yann Le Du 
on 
'[[http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0306511][Closed source versus open source in a model of software bug dynamics]]'. 
The model shows that 
_Releasing immediately bug fixes speeds up the debugging process, which substantiates bazaar open-source methodology._