March 13, 2008

Ms. Marsha Hughes, PMP, CSM
mb_hughes@yahoo.com

Click for: Marsha Hughes' slides

We invite the Austin software community to come and describe their requirements for finding and sharing information about software practices and technology in Austin. Over the last few months, we’ve noticed some specific needs, which if addressed, would help people find what they need in this very vibrant community. There are undoubtedly many other categories and stories you can add to this list:

• PM items: As a project manager, I want to get more experience stories from local Austin PM’s with teams in India, so that I can try those ideas with my team. [heard after the Jan. IEEE CS meeting]
• Developer items: As a developer, I want to carry on this conversation with Jorge, so that I can figure out how to use refactoring in my traditional software development (we don’t use agile methods yet). [heard after the Jan. ASPIN meeting]
• Technology items: As program chair for this group, I want to find local experts in building wikis, so that I can find a speaker (or several) for a program on Wiki Best Practices. [heard in at least 3 conversations in November, December, and January]

So, can we get a comprehensive set of requirements? What would people like to know, which isn’t easily accessible, to enable our software community to share and grow its skills? Come and contribute your requirements. Based on those, we’ll take the next steps to a solution – building or extending resources in the community. Going through the process at this meeting, you’ll experience a novel use of one of the methods of agile development – writing user stories for a community collaboration project.

We’ll also discuss how this session will be followed by a series that will take the requirements to a real solution over the next several months by a team of volunteers from our community.

Marsha Hughes has 24+ years of experience in software development, as a programmer, business analyst, project manager, instructor, course developer, and consultant. She has developed and delivered Requirements Engineering and Project Management workshops to TeraQuest, Borland, and IconATG corporate clients worldwide. Marsha developed Vignette’s Content Management Blueprint, a business analysis approach for developing content management applications, and the Vignette Solutions Methodology for Vignette Professional Services. Using agile techniques such as storyboards and paper prototyping, she developed requirements for an engineering drawing management system at NYNEX (now Verizon). At Texas Instruments, she worked with a user group to define knowledge base rules for a gate management system for both Northwest Airlines and Heathrow Airport, and used rapid prototyping techniques to design a hand-held trading device for the Chicago Board of Trade. She has published and presented on the topics of requirements engineering, knowledge engineering, and project management, and is a co-inventor on a 1993 patent for Computer-Aided Decision Making.