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MS in Software Engineering, Development Management Track Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read about our students' experiences through the MS in Software Engineering, Development Track program.

Linda is a first year part-time student in Carnegie Mellon's MS Software Engineering, Development Management track. She is a Software Developer at Electronic Arts in Redwood Shores, CA. She likes to dance and sing and her favorite videogame is The Beatles RockBand. She enjoys Indian, Japanese, Thai, Italian and Mexican food. She comes from Mexico City, and has being living in CA for the past two years.
Pras Sarkar is a second-year part-time student in the MS Software Engineering Development Management track. He works in Yahoo! Labs. His responsibilities include materializing ideas and concepts into engaging prototypes and demos, some of which ultimately mature into products that Yahoo! visitors use everyday. He is interested in emerging web technologies, social interaction over digital mediums, and creative interfaces that push the boundaries of human computer interaction.
Vineet is a Lead Developer at Boeing and a second year grad student in the part-time MS Software Engineering, Development Management program. He loves reading, playing with his daughter and pursuing the religious aspect of his life. He is an active volunteer of Vedic Cultural Center, a Seattle-based organization dedicated to promote the Vedic (ancient Indian) arts, culture, music and dance.
Truc is a second year part-time student in Carnegie Mellon's MS Software Engineering, Development Management track. She is a Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, CA. She loves food and enjoys anything related to food: going to different restaurants, cooking, watching the Food Network, and of course, eating!

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

My Grad School Adventure Begins!


My name is Sirisha Pillalamarri. Before I start, here’s a little bit of info about me. I’m a 2006 graduate from Carnegie Mellon University (the main campus in Pittsburgh). I received my degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a double major in Computer Science. After graduation, I started working at a company called FactSet Research Systems, Inc. They are based in Norwalk, CT, and we make software for Wall Street. It’s a great company and a fun job; however, I had been thinking about graduate school for a while. I wanted to find a program that was more practical than a typical research-based masters for my career progression. I wanted my learning to apply back to my job at FactSet, and I wanted to learn both technical and management ideas. Another requirement for me was that I wanted to keep working in Connecticut while I attending school. I found that all of my requirements converged at Carnegie Mellon’s west coast campus, where I am now enrolled as a remote student in the MS Software Engineering, Development Management program.

So it’s been nearly three months since I’ve started this program and this blog will be a document of what I find on my way!

Let me talk about orientation for a little bit. Orientation is a four day event when you will meet and develop close bonds with all the other students you’ll be working with for the next two years. We have to fly out to California (one of the two required in-person gatherings) and they “orient” us to the program and the course of study. There are a lot of team-building exercises and we get prepped for our first class. The first year of this program is entirely technical, so both the Technical and Development Management tracks are mixed together for the entire year. We are also assigned teams during orientation and we spend a lot of time together. My experience was great! I ended up arriving in Cali a day late and I was very worried of the repercussions; however, the faculty and student services staff at Carnegie Mellon West were amazing! They were so nice and got me caught up and let me settle right in. I also went out during one of the nights to San Francisco with some fellow Software Engineering students (two of whom were my team members) and it was a very fun night and a great way to learn about each other!

After orientation, I jumped right into Foundations of Software Engineering. One of my main concerns was that I would be attending this entire program remotely. How was coding together going to work? Would our meetings be productive? Would I be able to get my ideas in? How would the infrastructure hold together? I was also, obviously, concerned about the time commitment I was taking on, working full-time and attending this grad program. I wasn’t sure how I would transition from working and having my nights free to working during the day and working during my evenings as well!

Well, I can say that the transition has gone fairly smoothly. Since I am in Eastern Time, I come home and take an hour to eat dinner or so and start working on graduate school work at 9:30 PM (6 PM PST) and work till 1 or 2 am. Hey, don’t let the late nights scare you – I may go to bed later now, but I also have shifted my entire schedule - I go to work one or two hours later now but I leave later work later too.

Since we are a remote team, we try to meet everyday for at least five to ten minutes to go over what has happened the day before. Since we spend several hours on the phone, we use Skype as our primary audio software and we use Live Meeting or Himachi to share desktops while we are coding or having a meeting. So far we have not had any major issues with being a virtual team. In fact, it’s more flexible. I don’t have to drive to a certain place to have my meeting or worry about the weather conditions, etc. So to my surprise, working virtually has been quite convenient.

The main challenge (and benefit) of this program and specifically this class, is that you work very tightly with your team. We are assigned to do pair programming, we are encouraged to meet everyday, and the code has so many interdependencies that it is very hard to split up into tasks. In my undergrad experience, I was used to working on my homework or my part and then integrating it with my classmates; it’s a different story at the grad level. So much of what we do is in teams and interactive, that I really have to plan well, so my time is as productive as possible. However, what’s nice is that outside of these meetings, I usually don’t have to do much more individual work for CMU, so that’s a positive. I’ll let you know if this gets any easier as our team learns each others’ strengths better.

The way Carnegie Mellon West is setup is to put you in a real-life simulated environment. It isn’t the traditional classroom setting where you are given strict instructions, deadlines and information that is easy to access. We learn to gather information, ideas, feedback, and suggestions through constant interaction with your peers, advisor and faculty members. So get ready for that.

Anyway, this is the start of Iteration 3 (the week of vacation is over…L). I’ll keep y’all posted on what I figure out, how I do it, and what the end result will be. Keep reading for more updates!

PS: Happy Halloween!

posted by Sirisha @ 3:20 PM  1 comments

Monday, October 15, 2007

Study groups, Reflections on the first half of the new semester


Wow, I can’t believe the Elements of Software Management course is (almost) over: only a presentation left and we will all be able to take a well deserved break.

This mini has been very different from the previous classes in that there were no team deliverables: they were all individual and only at the end did we have to make decisions together.

This is very different from what we (the DM students) were used to: our first year was almost exclusively focused on teams, group dynamics and getting to ramp up an effective team. Here, the study group acted more like a support rather than a work group: we relied on each other to talk about our individual work and share knowledge, insight or review each other’s work but we still were working on our own.

The program’s structure was as follows: once a week, we would have a session with a faculty member and other study groups where we would discuss our readings. Some time later in the week our study group would meet and discuss in the presence of a faculty member (our team advisor). Finally, we would hold one more study group meeting where we would discuss and review our deliverables.

This is not a lot of meetings, and quite honestly the change of pace was a little destabilizing: we had to spend a lot more time reading and working on our deliverables than managing a common project. This structure made it somewhat hard to get to know the other people in our study group, and I don’t think we ever passed the Forming stage of team development.

However, I still learned a lot during this course. My objective for the course was to become able to assess a software business’ strategy and financials and I found a new passion: I love reading financial statements and analyzing data. That was not the case of most people in my group (far from it), and it looks many people preferred the strategy assessment part.

Overall, I think I really enjoyed this course and it was a really nice change of pace going from a purely software-development oriented year with classes on requirements, architecture… to something a lot more general that encompasses not only the critical development phase of a project but also the soundness of a business and its practices.

For the last 7 weeks, I have been studying a software company and getting to know it as much as I can. The really fun part of this course is that we have to make a prognosis of where the business we study is going to be in 2 years and I would really love to see how far off from reality I am. Right now, I am pretty confident in my analysis and the soundness of my reasoning but we all know how things can change at the last minute.

I need to go prepare for my presentation tomorrow (wish me luck). Next time I will talk about my first impressions with the next course: Metrics for Software Managers.

posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 3:33 PM  0 comments

Monday, October 1, 2007

Start of Year Two


Year Number Two has started, and it’s time for me to start the management-specific portion of the program.

We are now separated from the technical track students (if you want to know what they are up to, I suggest reading Minh’s blog), and doing joint work with the software management program students.

During the Elements of Software Management course, we are not working on teams anymore but rather in what we call study groups: our deliverables are individual but we discuss readings and assignments. Also, my group decided to review each other’s assignments in an effort to improve communication and (hopefully) quality.

The basic idea of this course is that we are assigned a particular software company to analyze from different aspects: strategy, finances, etc. It can be pretty interesting at times and pretty boring at others (I’m not a huge fan of financial statements, although some of my other classmates are really into it). However, I think it puts a lot more emphasis on the business aspect of software: this is why I switched from the Technical to Development Management track.

The change of pace is kind of hard to get accustomed to after having fallen into a routine for the past 3 semesters, but overall I think it will make me appreciate better the challenges faced by higher-level managers and executives. So far, I have learned a lot of things with which I was not at all familiar – from finding a company’s strategy to reading a balance sheet.

But more than that, the idea is that we are simultaneously learning all this and doing it at the same time. This is something one of the people in my focus group mentioned: if I only had to do the readings, I would forget that stuff pretty quickly. However, since I am analyzing a company at the same time it actually gives me the opportunity to see how this applies to the real world.

I also think learning this has made me a more well-rounded individual and while I currently don’t need all I’m learning in my job it certainly opens up more opportunities and it has allowed me to have interesting conversations with project managers and directors at work, and I think that’s what this is all about: even though I am far from being an executive I am now able to understand their jobs and the kind of decisions they have to make every day.

That’s it for today. Next time I’ll try to talk a little more on the dynamics of study groups and how this affects the way we work.

posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 2:00 PM  0 comments

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