ALM Connect Executive Day and EclipseCon, March 2013

by Andre Girard | 03/29/2013

ALM CONNECT EXECUTIVE DAY

VDC was excited to attend the ALM Connect Executive Day, which was run in parallel to EclipseCon 2013 in Boston this week. The objective of the executive day, to provide a platform for software delivery executives to discuss modern ALM practices in the context of business problems, is tightly aligned to our Software & System Lifecycle Management Tools research.

The day brought together leaders from ALM suppliers, ISVs and consulting firms to discuss how ALM is evolving in response to the changing software delivery environment. The M2M Embedded Software team investigates many of the same questions ALM Connect aimed to answer such as:

  • How does ALM work in the world shifting from 'Systems of Record' to systems of engagement?
  • How does SaaS, Mobile and open source change ALM?
  • What does Agile mean to ALM?
  • What does complex sourcing do to ALM?

Among the ALM Connect Executive Day highlights:

 “What ALM knowledge you can expect from Computer Science Graduates” with Gary Pollice, Professor of Practice, WPI Computer Science Department. A great description about what you should look for in a recent computer science graduate and, more importantly, why.

“Managing Complex Supply Chains with ALM” with Mik Kersten, CEO, Tasktop. Mik demonstrated how Tasktop is helping large corporations work through the mess they’ve made of their development lifecycle through piecemeal tool adoption at team levels, corporate expansion, mergers and other realities of business as usual.

 “Scrum - Success Ends with Middle Management” with Ken Schwaber, the Co-creator of Scrum and CEO of Scrum.org. Ken stressed the importance of individuals and interactions over processes and tools as organizations look to create more agility. Also presented was the “Agility Index”, a means to track progress towards of process improvement goals.

“Future of ALM Panel” with Sam Guckenheimer, MS Visual Studio; Jeffery Hammond, Forrester Research; Raziel Tabib, HP; Mik Kersten, Tasktop; Mike O'Rourke, IBM Rational. The panel gave us a lively discussion on a number of topics including developer resistance to change, estimates on the enterprise ALM market size, and ongoing heterogeneity and integration challenges of ALM.