Assessment talk at Jazoon/SET 2012

On June 26, I will be giving a talk at SET/Jazoon 2012 (in Zurich) about Why you should care about software assessment.

Here is the abstract:

What is assessment? The process of understanding a given situation to support decision making. During software development, engineers spend as much as 50% of the overall effort on doing precisely that: they try to understand the current status of the system to know what to do next. In other words, assessing the current system accounts for half of the development budget. These are just the direct costs. The indirect costs can be seen in the quality of the decisions made as a result. That is why you should care about it.

What can you do about it?

• Make it explicit. Ignoring it won't make it go away. By acknowledging its existence you have a chance of learning from past experiences and of optimizing your approach.
• Tailor it. Currently, developers try to assess the system by reading the source code. This is highly ineffective and it simply does not scale to the size of the modern systems. You need tools, but not any tools. Your system is special and your most important problems will be special as well. That is why generic tools that produce nice looking reports won't make a difference. You need smart tools that are tailored to your needs.
• Educate it. The ability to assess is a skill. Like any skill, it needs to be educated. Enterprises need to understand that they need to allocate the budget for those custom tools, and engineers need to understand that it is within their reach to build them. It's not rocket science. It just requires a different focus.

All in all, assessment is a discipline. More information about our view on assessment can be found at: http://humane-assessment.com

The talk is targeted equally to software engineers and managers, and it exemplifies the above points through several case studies.