technical program

tuesday morning
convention centre

8:30am-10:00am -- General Session -- Keynote Address

"Unleashing Creativity While Still Getting the Job Done"

Paul B. MacCready, AeroVironment, Inc.

Exhibit Hall A
 

Some pioneering developments of remarkable vehicles are presented. Although entertaining themselves, their greater value is in serving as a framework for exploration of the development process - the mingling of motivation, goals, questions, problem solving, creativity, teams, economics, constraints, and competition. The use of computational tools is put in perspective, together with learning from nature and sometimes utilizing Evolutionary Computations or Multidisciplinary Design Optimization.

Paul MacCready holds a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and has, since the age of 16, been involved in a wide variety of interesting research and development projects, none of them object-oriented, but all of them more innovative, more creative, and farther along the technology curve than anyone else. In 1977, his team made the first sustained, controlled flight by a human-powered aircraft with the Gossamer Condor. In 1979, his team bettered that with the Gossamer Albatross flight across the English Channel. In 1980, they flew a solar powered aircraft, the Gossamer Penguin, and in 1981, they flew the Solar Challenger from Paris to England.

Not content to stop there, his team built the Bionic Bat high-speed human powered aircraft, and in 1987 they trounced the competition in the 1,867 mile solar-powered race across Australia using their GM Sunraycer. This project went on to become part of the GM Impact battery-powered sports car. Each and every one of these projects has pushed the envelope in ways not thought possible, and Mr. MacCready has an excellent perspective on what it takes to succeed in the far reaches of what is possible - how to find interesting problems, how to solve those problems when it appears impossible, and how to think "outside the box".

Because of his creativity and ingenuity, he has won a wide variety of awards including the Collier Trophy, the Reed Aeronautical Award, the Inventor of the Year Award, the Lipper Award for outstanding contribution to creativity, the United Inventors' Pioneer of Invention Award, and many others. He has been awarded five honorary degrees, authored or co-authored over one hundred papers. He lectures for industry and educational institutions, emphasizing creativity and the development of broad thinking skills.

10:30am-noon

Panel:   "Object-Oriented practice in 1998: Does it help or hinder collaboration?"

Ballroom B

Groups of people working in concert perform most commercial, industrial or in-house software development. These groups are often quite diverse. To successfully complete today's projects, does object-oriented development as practiced today do an adequate job of supporting ALL of the participants who must collaborate? To address this question, we bring together not only object-oriented consultants and developers but also practitioners and researchers interested in human factors and user-centered design, project management and technical writing.

Moderator: John Artim, OOCL

Panelists:
Charlie Bridgeford, Employer's Reinsurance Corporation
Lillian Christman, Human Factors, OOCL (USA), Inc.
James Coplien, Bell Laboratories
Mary Beth Rosson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Stanley Taylor, Apple Computer
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Wirfs-Brock Associates

Technical Papers:

Exhibit Hall A
Chair: Peter Sweeney, IBM Research

"An Evaluation of Automatic Object Inline Allocation Techniques"
Julian Dolby, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Andrew A. Chien, University of California, San Diego

"JRes: A Resource Accounting Interface for Java"
Grzegorz Czajkowski and Thorsten von Eicken, Cornell University

"Dynamic Class Loading in the Java Virtual Machine"
Sheng Liang and Gilad Bracha, Sun Microsystems

Practitioner Reports:

Ballroom A
Use Cases Session Leader:  Ron Crocker, Motorola Inc.

"Process Improvement to Overcome Use Case Weaknesses: an Experience Report"
John Tassopoulos and Glen Xia, GIO Australia

In this report, we describe a real-life experience obtained in employing a use case modeling approach (as part of the requirements modeling process) in the successful delivery of a major release of a large, object-oriented, insurance software development project. The strengths and weaknesses of the approach, as experienced in the project, are introduced. The software process improvement initiatives put in place to overcome the inherent weakness associated with the use case modeling approach, and those associated with our specific process, are described. The process improvement initiatives were derived using not only qualitative measures, but also quantitative results from the measurement program. Finally, a plan to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of our process improvement initiatives is provided.

"Object Behaviour Modeling in Large Software Systems"
Kevin W. Smith, Nortel

Today, most software designers are familiar with structural object modeling, which defines the compile-time relationships between objects. However, relatively few software designers have formally modeled the internal behaviour of objects. Commercially, there are a number of CASE tools, such as ObjecTime, Rhapsody, and CAP, that model detailed object behaviour, and subsequently generate production-quality code in popular languages such as C++ or Java. With these, the next generation of CASE tools, behavioural modeling is rapidly moving towards the forefront of software design. This paper critically examines the merits of behavioural object modeling, and presents a series of practical guidelines developed over the course of a very large commercial software engineering effort.

"Application of Use Cases in Formal Requirements Management Processes"
Alison Shapiro and Gary L. Patton, Carnegie Group, Inc.

The use case model provides practitioners of an object-oriented methodologies with a technique for defining and clarifying software requirements. Carnegie Group has had success with using use cases for modeling requirements in certain projects. However, use cases alone have not proven sufficient in ensuring that the software that we develop meets user expectations. Therefore we have undertaken to combine use cases with more formal requirements definition and management processes. This report presents results from reviewing the requirements analysis process and documentation of five projects that were preformed as we attempted to combine use cases with formal requirements management processes.

 

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Last updated 05 October 1998 15:13:50