 |
| Home | · | Schedule | · | Tracks | · | Recommendations | · | Registration |
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
PanelsChair: Steven D. Fraser, Independent Consultant, sdfraser@acm.org
OOPSLA panels are lively, participatory, educational, and entertaining. They offer an interactive opportunity to share perspectives, debate opinions, and communicate best-practices. Part of the enduring appeal of OOPSLA panels is to showcase the opinions of leading researchers and industry experts. |
|
Tuesday, 28 October
|
10:30-12:00 |
Panel: Meeting the Challenge of Software Engineering Education for Working Professionals in the 21st Century |
|
15:30-17:00 |
Panel: Xtreme Programming and Agile Coaching |
Wednesday, 29 October
|
10:30-12:00 |
Panel: Discipline and Practices of TDD (Test Driven Development) |
|
13:30-15:00 |
Panel: Innovate! |
|
15:30-17:00 |
Panel Model Driven Architecture: How far have we come, how far can we go? |
Thursday, 30 October
Meeting the Challenge of Software Engineering Education for Working Professionals in the 21st CenturyTuesday, 28 October – 10:30-12:00 |
Software engineering education for working professionals remains a challenge from the perspective of determining relevant content; identifying effective methods for delivery; and maintaining the focus and motivation of students. This panel brings together academic and industry professionals to share their perspectives and experiences. Anticipated points for discussion include: education/training delivery strategies, curriculum definition, marketing issues, collaboration strategies to engage industry sponsorship, value assessments for students and sponsoring organizations, and program success stories. This will be a highly interactive panel and the audience should come prepared to both ask and answer questions.
Xtreme Programming and Agile CoachingTuesday, 28 October – 15:30-17:00 |
This panel brings together coaches to discuss all aspects of the practice: how to become a coach, choosing a coach, and describing what is to be an (in) effective coach. A coach watches, provides feedback, and suggests subtle direction. The coach may be more—for example—an architect or team lead—but that is a matter for debate. This session will be run as a panel with two open "fish bowl" seats, only one of which may be occupied by audience members at any one time. The panelists will defend their positions and offer feedback. Panelists were asked to offer their observations on three questions: How did YOU become a coach? What's the toughest thing you've had to do as a coach? What's your advice for teams looking for a coach?
Discipline and Practices of TDD (Test Driven Development)Wednesday, 29 October – 10:30-12:00 |
This panel brings together practitioners with experience in Agile and XP methodologies to discuss the approaches and benefits of applying Test Driven Development (TDD). The goal of TDD is clean code that works. The mantra of TDD is: write a test; make it run; and make it right. Open questions to be addressed by the panel include:
- How are TDD approaches to be applied to databases, GUIs, and distributed systems?
- What are the quantitative benchmarks that can demonstrate the value of TDD, and
- What are the best approaches to solve the ubiquitous issue of scalability?
Innovate!Wednesday, 29 October – 13:30-15:00 |
Freedom to innovate is one of the key motivators for many technical workers. Unfortunately, although innovation is often trumpeted as a key company attribute, it seems that many organizations struggle to provide the necessary environment—even those organizations whose original claim to fame lay in their ability to innovate. This panel will look at the barriers to innovation that occur in a variety of environments: large, well-established organizations, start-ups, academia, standards bodies and the open source community. Panelists will propose a set of technical and non-technical techniques that can be used to foster innovation in even the most lethargic or hostile environment.
Model Driven Architecture: How far have we come, how far can we go?Wednesday, 29 October – 15:30-17:00 |
Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is a technology that has been in the process of evolution for many years. Today, many vendors are now producing products that support MDA. We are hearing more and more success stories that indicate that this technology is the "real deal". But, with the failed promises of CASE in the late 1980's, many people still have questions about how much of an application can be generated from models and constraint languages. Is MDA really capable of generating enterprise applications? What are the technologies are available to implement MDA? Here is your opportunity to ask the experts the questions that are necessary to convince you of the validity of this new technology. Each of these panelists has been intricately involved in building the underlying foundations of Model Driven Architecture and its implementation.
Agile Management—An Oxymoron?Thursday, 30 October – 8:30-10:00 |
"Self-directed team" is one of the mantras of Agile Methodologies. Self-direction means that the team's manager is relegated to a facilitator role with little or no influence over day-to-day activities. For example, Kent Beck has written that the manager of an XP project can do four things: ask for estimates on cost and results, move people around among projects, ask for status reports, and cancel the project. Agile literature in general says that managers shouldn't be directly involved in analysis, design, coding, testing or integration. They may (but only occasionally!) facilitate the process between the customer and the developers; and it would be nice if they provided food and toys to keep the team happy. It appears, then, that the agile manger is expected to hover on the fringes of a project asking a few questions and throwing in goodies—but with ultimate power (cancellation) in her hip pocket. This scenario makes one wonder. Do managers really matter to the success of an agile project? Are they superfluous? What happens when managers step over the prescribed line—does it mean that the end of Agile Methodology as we know it and as handed down by the Agile Manifesto? The panel will explore this ticklish terrain by answering the following questions: Why Agile Methods and managers don't mix. Or do they? What can/should managers do in an agile environment? Under what conditions are managers an absolute requirement in an agile environment? (e.g. Government applications?) Do good management techniques apply to both Agile and non-Agile environments? Is management a dead-end profession in an Agile world?
Object-Oriented Success Stories: "Learning from our Failures"Thursday, 30 October – 10:30-12:00 |
Beneath the buzz around methodologies, languages and technologies, the last eighteen years at OOPSLA have seen countless object-oriented success stories, large and small. This fishbowl will provide OOPSLA attendees to bear witness to these victories, and tell these tales at last. Similarly we propose a follow-up fishbowl that discusses our failures. Just as much (if not more) can be learned from failures as can from successes.
Panel: Reuse Repositories and Reuse—The RealitiesThursday, 30 October – 10:30-12:00 |
This session starts with a photo-essay on components, reuse, value, and beauty, and concludes with a panel on libraries, repositories, and reuse.
Without a Name: A Reusable Component RepositoryRobert Biddle,
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand,
robert@mcs.vuw.ac.nz
The Story - this essay concerns components, reuse, value, and beauty. All photographs were taken at No Name Building Recyclers, Wellington, New Zealand, with the kind permission of the owners. |
Panel: Reuse Repositories and Reuse—The RealitiesDave Thomas,
Bedarra Research Labs & Carleton University,
dave@bedarra.com
This panel (part of the 2003 Onward! program) will discuss repositories, and reuse. While there is so much hype and noise about components and model repositories, metadata and reuse there is still very little understood about how hard it is to design for reuse and to encourage systematic reuse both in terms of culture, design, and supporting tools and technology. Like standards we have a plethora of component models to choose from and yet the long predicted component market place has yet to occur or has it already happened? Our educational colleagues outside of the our community are blindly following our rhetoric to build eLearning repositories so Learning Objects can be snapped together just like the OO folks do it! Similarly object zealots are arguing for OO XML, OO CSS to facilitate reuse OO style. Our panelists have participated in both the euphoric vision as well as the pragmatic realities of repositories reuse in practice. The panel has been asked to discuss their future vision for reuse and repositories and in particular what key social, business and technical enablers will facilitate significant reuse or render the matter irrelevant. |
What's so eXtreme About Doing Things Right?Thursday, 30 October – 13:30-15:00 |
Agile Methods are advocated as a way of producing better software. Advocates of agile methods suggest that practices such as keeping in close communication with your customers, frequent integration, and frequent assessment of project status will enable us to produce software that has value for the customer—quality software. It's hard to argue with that. But why is this any different than simply "good" software development practice? Why does saying "Scrum" "Agile" or "XP" grab peoples' attention? Why does it take a name for useful practices to be accepted? This panel will help us understand the role of hype in getting useful practices accepted or rejected. We will explore why it is that these good ideas have not been more widely used. Some of the questions that the panel and the audience will explore are: Why do we ignore proven practices until we see them packaged as a "method?" Can we do something different in the workplace or in school to teach these practices? Or is it the case that these practices are not universally good? This panel talks about agility in a different context than what is typical: we won't just discuss what agile practices are. We will explore why they are not more widely adopted, especially when not packaged as part of a "named" method like XP, and we will discuss why projects suffer even when the methods that can help them are well known. This panel will provide an entertaining and thought provoking forum for discussing an issue that is ever present in the world of technology: the role of hype. We concentrate on agile practices, moving beyond simply enumerating them, to discussing why they are not more widely adopted.
Application Servers: One Size Fits All ... Not?Thursday, 30 October – 13:30-15:00 |
In the beginning there was machine language, followed by assembly language, formula translation, and eventually procedural programming, to organize the chaos. And then objects were introduced, to hide information. Soon Client/Server and multi-tier applications were conceived to separate data concerns from business logic concerns and user interface concerns. Later, these objects were distributed geographically to optimize hardware resources. And now, we have application servers, to simplify scaling up a system for large volumes, improved response times, impeccable reliability, and high availability. Application servers house the business logic, operating on data from a different server, and responding to requests from any source. But these Application Servers come in all shapes, flavors, and sizes. What is a developer to do? This panel will explore issues comparing application server technologies and questions about their appropriate use in different contexts.