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MS Software Management Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read along as our students chronicle their journey through the MS in Software Management program.

Amin is a second year grad student in the MS Software Management program, a former Software Design Engineer from Microsoft and a current Software Engineer at Adify, a Silicon Valley startup. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, software and traveling. He would love to start a software company someday.
Vineet is a second year part-time software management student, currently working @NetApp also nominated as the best place to work in North America recently. His area of expertise is Oracle ERP solutions. Other professional areas of interest are SaaS markets both technologically and business wise. @CMU he wants to grow his knowledge to manage software products and businesses. He is interested in work on start up ideas. On the personal side he loves to spend time with his family and travel.
Rene is a recent alum, a manager of operations and program manager in Cisco's software development organization, the mother of two daughters and a performing arts fan.

Monday, May 7, 2007

Winding Down One Class and Gearing Up for Another


In this blog, I am going to spend some time summarizing the key learnings from the Systems and Requirements course before sharing my experience from the kickoff of the Business of Software course.

Conclusion of Systems and Requirements Course

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, this semester was focused on “Systems and Requirements.” The second half of the course was dedicated to creating a requirements document and a product roadmap, and “pitching” both to the CEO and VP of Marketing (roles played by two of our professors). Our team completed the presentation to the senior management on Saturday, April 21. It was well received, however, in my humble opinion, our team underestimated the business case and the investment plan aspect of our proposal. Though it did not impact the final grade (team consensus regarding the business plan was not part of the grading rubric), we should have done a better job articulating and mitigating the risk related to the new project. It goes to show you that especially when getting into a room with senior management, one not only needs to “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” on the details but also have clarity on the big picture.

There was consensus among all my classmates that the contextual design and the use case as a means of capturing business requirements was the key learning everyone came away with.

It will take me a while to digest some of the nuances of the use case approach to gathering requirements. But I am completely convinced that it is a far better tool to convey the requirements to all the internal and external stakeholders in most situations.

Well-earned rest

We had a one-week break before the start of the next course – The Business of Software. It gave me some time to start a Vanpool from San Jose to San Mateo along with three colleagues at work. The vanpool gives me time to catch up on reading to and from work and, gauging the gas price trend, this makes fiscal sense as well. Additionally, it has helped me tremendously in my calendar and task management at work and gives me more time to spend with my family. However, using vanpool through this semester means that I will be attending all the plenary sessions and team meetings remotely, even though I’m a local student. In the coming weeks I will write more on the ‘remote attendance’ experience.

New Software Industry Conference

Carnegie Mellon West and UC Berkeley organized a daylong conference on the “New Software Industry,” last Monday, April 30th. I took time off from work to attend the conference, which was made up of various sessions and had the opportunity to hear Silicon Valley leaders talk about the future of software companies and its trends. The conference provided their perspective from both technology trends and investment trends into technology. Some of the speakers at the conference included Ray Lane, Timothy Chou, Prof. Michael Cusumano, and Prof. Tony Wasserman (who also happens to be one of our own professors). The conference was free for the Carnegie Mellon West students – one of the perks of being a student at a leading software university!

Business Of Software

The general structure of each semester is that each course starts with a “kick-off.” The kick-off sets the tone for the entire semester, and gives the professor the opportunity to introduce the subject matter, introduce new student teams, go over the syllabus, the goals for the class, and the deliverables required of us as students. As part of the course kick-off, Professor Tony Wasserman had invited Professor Michael Cusumano to deliver a presentation on the trends in software management. Prof. Cusumano shared his research on the software industry and a portion of this extends to his writings in his book, The Business of Software.

We have already started working on “Task 1” for this course. As I’ve mentioned before, each course builds upon the learnings from the last course. A great example of this is in the first task itself. Task 1 requires the new teams to select one proposal out of the various proposals given by the different teams during the previous course, “Systems and Requirements.” As we all have new teams now, each of our teams has a representative from one of the previous semester’s teams – an advocate for each of the proposals presented last semester. So in the first two weeks, we will need to choose one of the proposals as the final proposal for which all the teams will create a business plan. Our team has honed in on two proposals at this time and we have about a week to select the proposal that we will work on for the rest of this semester. It will be difficult to choose which proposal to work on, as we all have an attachment to our own proposal we created last semester. But this discussion is forcing us to collaborate, both inter- and intra-team, to make the best decision regarding the business viability of the proposal.

This course is going to be very interesting and should help all of us get into the business side of software and understand it better.

posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 12:01 PM  0 comments

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