Thursday, December 28, 2006, 01:47 PM - Personal
Today I got some nice shots of my dog while we were on a walk in the mountain.
There seems to be a lot I need to learn about taking pictures of moving objects.
Click on the picture below to open the album in Picasa Web
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( 3 / 3145 )Thursday, December 21, 2006, 11:15 AM - CMMI, Personal
The latest news about me is that I took the way to becoming instructor for the Introduction to CMMI course. I already attended the course in November in Frankfurt and am now looking to schedule and conduct my observation. For this I am partnering with the Bulgarian ESI Center .
Perhaps many would like to know more about the Instructor course. Well the course is superb in my opinion. We had excellent trainers that have been working with CMMI for many years and had very deep understanding of complex concepts. The other important part is that you learn a lot about training by watching the instructors as well as the other students.
The model training
Even though the training is not aimed towards the model you do learn a lot about CMMI in these 3 days. To learn at this level about CMMI one must have very good idea of the process areas and the discussion will bring new level of understanding of the model. Some of the things discussed include Process Area relationships, evolution of concepts through the levels of the model, better understanding of how to read and apply CMMI and last but not least the concept of institutionalization.
Trainer training
The other aspect of importance to me was to acquire or enrich my trainer skills and better understand what it takes to teach the course. Again the experience and professionalism of the trainers helped a lot.
The intro training is very fine balance between interactive and engaging training experience and racing against the clock. The training gives you some guidelines how to avoid loosing time, save time if you lost some and how to keep the discussion to the point and avoid distractions.
On the trainer training one is able to see two experienced trainers and several other individuals in my case all form different cultural background. This combined with the ability to experiment with different approaches makes the training valuable experience that sets guidelines for further improvement.
I guess some of you will be interested to take the instructor course yourself and are wondering how difficult is the training and what preparation is required. The answer is that one needs to know the model well and spend a week or two in preparation on the model and few days for completion of the pre-class assignment. The training itself is intensive and not easy, but the instructors do help a lot and aim to have all successful classes. During the course there is one examination and several presentations for assessing the capabilities of the candidate instructors. These should not be a problem provided one knows the model well and is serious about becoming instructor. Indeed during the presentations you will be encouraged to experiment and try out approaches you would not otherwise attempt in front of audience.
Finally if you are new to CMMI and would like to learn more get in touch!
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( 3 / 7183 )Tuesday, October 24, 2006, 01:59 PM - CMMI
Yesterday I finished the on-line upgrade training for CMMI 1.2. In summary CMMI 1.2 focuses on making the model easier to use and opens the possibilities to extend the model in the future. It as well contains corrections to the model that fill in gaps and correct ambiguities. In my humble opinion CMMI 1.2 is a small but needed step forward. This step opens the door for much more new developments - in 2007 we should see two additional CMMI models released.
About the training itself it is not hard perhaps it would take couple of days (16 hours) effort at average to read through the training material and as well read the updated/added texts in the model. As with the other CMMI trainings it takes a bit longer as timeline to understand things and think them through. The training is self paced and one can arrange the reading of the materials in convenient time. There is no multimedia content in the training materials and printable version of all materials is provided for off-line usage.
The training material is well organized in presentation style slides with sufficient texts to eliminate the need for trainer. This method of presentation is much simpler to read and comprehend then text document like the model itself. The training is split in 6 parts covering all aspects of the changes in CMMI 1.2
1. Training introduction
2. Model updates – this is the main chunk and for me it took longest time to go through and understand each piece.
3. Appraisal updates
4. Training updates
5. Institutionalization discussion
6. The new model architecture
In addition refresher slides for the model and appraisal method are provided.
I will probably make another post in the next days to summarize the changes in the model as I understood them.
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( 3 / 2732 )Thursday, July 27, 2006, 10:28 PM - Personal
Hello from me. So to bring a quick update to all who is peeking at the site. I have made few remarkable achievements for me. One is that I finally presented my thesis work and this completes my studies for Masters degree !!!
The thesis work itself is a web site and IS for managing a scientific conference - Computer Science 2006. You can see the web site by following the link to Conference Website. So far it is running successfully for over a month and we have around 120 article abstracts submitted.
The system is simple and flexible, so if anyone wants to host a conference and needs an IS let me know.
On the process side few interesting things too.
I received from SEI the Watts Humphrey book "Winning with software". It is very interesting book. Gives a good perspective what ingridients make successful software projects and introduces the TSP.
There are as well some interesting developments and I may soon be helping people take on the path to improvement.
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( 3 / 3211 )Tuesday, July 11, 2006, 12:04 AM
Tomorrow we will have a meeting of the Bulgarian SPIN group. Lately our focus is on discussing tools and their application to process improvement. This has been started since many of us found extremely hard to coop with some of the CMMI requirements on data. Prime example for this is maintaining bi-directional traceability in REQM at CL2.
Thus we made decision to review tools in use in the next few meetings. We are looking at tools for Requirements management, project management and not least configuration management.
I have used Subversion over the past one year and a half and found it to be very useful tool. It surpasses by far classic solutions as CVS and SourceSafe and indeed offer in one package all their features plus a great deal more.
So what is it that I liked in Subversion. First the ability to access repository over standard HTTP protocol, second is the versioning of the whole repository over versioning of individual files. The later has enormous impact on the way one works. Now change sets can easily be reviewed, operations that revert edits are easy, and last but not least commits are atomic.
To tell everyone my good feeling towards this tool I made short presentation that you can download as well Subversion presentation
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