Category Archives: Books

Software Product Lines

July 6, 2008

For the past several years I have been interested in applying software product line development techniques to the domain in which I work (unmanned air vehicles). Specifically, I’m interested in applying these techniques to the development of Ground Control Station software. The concept of a software product line is well established in the software industry and a significant amount of academic and case study literature is available for review. The basic idea is to develop a core software product where [...]

Applying Iterative Development Methodologies to Large Software Projects

June 15, 2008

I wrote previously about my effort to develop a project schedule for a large software effort and alluded to my use of Time Boxing. In this post I’ll explain my interpretation of Time Boxing and describe some questions I still have with respect to applying the technique to large projects. When I was given this scheduling task I spent time researching software project management approaches and came across a good discussion of Time Boxing versus Scope Boxing in Bittner and [...]

The Mythical Man Month – Lessons Unheeded

March 19, 2008

In 1964 Dr. Fredrick Brooks assumed the role of manager for IBM’s OS/360 development effort. Arguably one of the most complex software systems of its time, OS/360 is the progenitor of IBM’s modern family of mainframe operating systems. After his tenure at IBM, Dr. Brooks joined the Computer Science faculty at the University of North Carolina where in 1975 he penned â€œThe Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineeringâ€ in which he describes the lessons he learned about managing large-scale software [...]