ACM SPEAKER: Software Engineering - Best Practices

Topic Overview:

How do you build software so good that lives can depend on it? What’s the difference between developing a program that works and developing a program that’s reliable and dependable? How would you manage a software project that required 100 people and had thousands of customers? The answers are known, but they aren’t widely taught. This talk discusses some of the processes and techniques essential for commercial grade software – that is, software that’s predictable in cost, schedule, and performance; high in quality; and maintainable. Among the techniques to be discussed are systems engineering, configuration management, risk management, quality assurance, estimating, and tracking.

Please join us for this talk and please forward these to those that might be interested! Thanks and we look forward to seeing you guys there. Refreshments will be served beforehand at 4:00pm and we will be taking the speaker out to Applebees afterwards.

Location:   Alden Hall 101
Date:   Tuesday, April 3
Time:   4:30 - ?

BIO:

Dennis Frailey is a Principal Fellow at Raytheon Company in Plano, Texas and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Southern Methodist University (SMU).

At Raytheon, Dennis is a pillar of the software engineering community. In addition to his program duties (he's currently responsible for software planning, processes and procedures for a major U.S. Army program) Dennis is a contributor to several business-wide and corporate-wide efforts for software engineering improvement, including software measurement, software quality and software development cycle time reduction. He also teaches internal courses in many aspects of software engineering and program management. Prior assignments include computer architect, operating system designer, compiler designer, and speechwriter for company executives.

Dennis has also worked at Texas Instruments, the Ford Motor Company, and as a tenured, Associate Professor at SMU. Although he left SMU in 1977, he has continued as an adjunct professor ever since. Dennis helped start the software engineering program at SMU and was vice-chair of the ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Coordinating Committee, chartered to foster the development of software engineering as a professional computing discipline.

He continues this work as a member of the IEEE-Computer Society Professional Practices Board. Dennis is also an ABET accreditation program evaluator in the fields of computer science, computer engineering and software engineering and was previously vice president of the ACM. He holds an MS and PhD in computer science (Purdue) and a BS in mathematics (Notre Dame).