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Walker Royce
Vice President, IBM Software Services-Rational
IBM
Walker Royce is the Vice President of IBM’s Worldwide Rational Lab Services. He has managed large software engineering projects, consulted with a broad spectrum of IBM's worldwide customer base, and developed software management approaches that exploit an iterative life-cycle, industry best practices, and architecture-first priorities. He is the author of two books: Software Project Management, A Unified Framework (Addison Wesley, 1998) and The Economics of Software Development (Addison Wesley, 2009).
Before joining Rational/IBM, Mr. Walker spent 16 years in software project development, software technology development, and software management roles at TRW Electronics & Defense. He was a recipient of TRW’s Chairman’s Award for Innovation for his contributions in distributed architecture middleware and iterative software processes and was named a TRW Technical Fellow.
Mr. Walker received a BA in physics from the University of California, an MS in computer information and control engineering from the University of Michigan, and completed three years of further study in computer science at UCLA.
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Presentation:
'Improving Software Economics and Achieving Agility at Scale'
The world is becoming more dependent on software delivery efficiency and world economies are becoming more dependent on producing software with improved economic outcomes. What we have learned over decades of advancing systems and software development best practice is that successful software production involves more of an economics mindset than an engineering discipline when it comes to managing software delivery projects. Most organizations that depend on software are struggling to transform their life-cycle model from a development focus to a delivery focus. This subtle distinction in wording represents a dramatic change in the principles that are driving the management philosophy and the governance models. A software development orientation focuses on the various activities required in the development process, while a software delivery orientation focuses on the results of that process.
Organizations that have successfully made this transition—perhaps 30-40% by our estimate—have recognized that engineering discipline is trumped by economics discipline in most software-intensive endeavors. Day-to-day decisions in software projects have always been, and continue to be, dominated by: value judgments, cost tradeoffs, human factors, macro-economic trends, technology trends, market circumstances, and timing. Software project activities are less concerned with engineering disciplines such as mathematics, material properties, laws of physics, or established and mature engineering models. The primary difference between economics and engineering governance is the amount of uncertainty inherent in the product under development. The honest treatment of uncertainty is the foundation of today’s best practices; we have learned over and over that what makes a software practice better or best is that the practice reduces uncertainty in the target outcome.
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Opening General Session
Salt Palace Convention Center Ballroom A/C
Monday 26 April 2010
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
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