Managing System Development - The first day

Before the class, I was pretty overwhelmed by the massive number of articles and posts to be read. I understood that I must prepare carefully for every class because I use English as a second language. So I read the two papers on NATO Conference and discussed about them with my friends. Thanks to them, I got some basic understanding of the problems which will be discussed in groups in class.



Basically, the two papers quoted some points of view on software engineering, which I will note here for the revision purpose:

 I\User Requirement
- Avoid over-reacting with users
- Users are not be able to identify what they need (in a software) and what is available and what is unavailable
- Handling of user request within a design group: There is a need to have somebody who filters user requests because the requests may contradict with each other.
- Effect of software on user: Software controls/alters users's behavior, which leads to new demand of equipment. The example in the paper is pretty hard to understand, so I tried to make one: My example is the situation in which a new CMS began to be used in a hospital, so patients' information will no longer be stored in papers, but in hard drive. In this case, the behavior of the doctors were changed. Gradually, doctors realized that the work of inputing patients' information by typing is so stressful, so they demanded new equipments such as a scanners to automatically scan patient's hard-copy file and convert them into digital ones. I discussed the example with my two friends and they totally agreed.

II\Nature of Software Engineering
- 3 occasions where major changes are made? (During the development process of a software system)

III\Software Engineering management&Methodology
- Software design methodology = what a program is + methods, procedures, technique to develop the program - what is "system-type" person? 

IV\Design&Production in Software Engineering
- The need to distinct design & production process
- Software development: Iterative process
- Myth: know what to do, then code.

 My thought on the papers is that they are difficult to understand due to the complicated sentence structure. However, I tried to read the papers many times and came up with some core points in the end. In the class, when we did the group work on the papers, I could understand my classmates quite clearly thanks to the preparation. However, the discussion is still limited because of the language barrier. So overall, I think the first class is fine, and I will continue prepare for the class in the future. At the end of the class, the professor recommended a book named "The soul of a new machine" which I already bought one. This book seems interesting, I will post my comments on it in later posts.