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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!

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Metrics and the challenges of new teams


So I’m rounding the corner toward the end of the semester, and I can’t believe we’ve almost completed another course already. This time I’m in the Metrics for Software Manager’s course and it requires us to familiarize ourselves with several concepts that were mostly unknown to us when we first started: a quick survey made by one of the professors on our first plenary session revealed almost none of us had dealt with metrics before. And she pointed out that after a few weeks many of us realized we know a lot more about metrics than we thought.

The format of the course is interesting: we are a team of consultants and we are brought in by a company to help them reach some goals. Usually, the project has some history and we are here to help mitigate risks, avoid the same pitfalls and reach the organization goals.

Of course, none of this is actually spelled out for us. We usually get a description of the problem like what we would get from the customers if we were to talk to them. So, before we even start measuring things we have to figure out what the organization goals are, how can metrics help them and finally make a metrics proposal.

This has been a very hectic course so far, and I have to say I’m looking forward to the end of the class and holiday break. The class structure is comparable to the other classes we’ve had so far, but my team has had a lot of challenges in getting up to speed.

First of all, this is the first time in all my classes that I’ve been on a team where none of us really knew each other: one of my teammates is also a second-year SEDM student like myself, but I’ve never had the opportunity to team with him before. My other two teammates are actually first-year students from the MS in Software Management program, so they are in their first semester at CMU and are still getting accustomed to quick teaming, class structures, etc. This has made the organization of the team take a lot longer than we would all have liked.

Its great to have a new mix of students to interact with – it opens up our network and exposes us to students who have other types of software experience. However, its hard to leave the comfort of the group you’re most familiar with – I’d spent a year already getting to know my fellow Software Engineering students, so now it takes effort on my part to get to know a new group of classmates. On my team, we’ve discovered several very strong personalities, so we’re experiencing a lot of talking and arguing together: this is good in the sense that we are challenged; but probably not the best way for us to be productive.

Finally (and I don’t know if its because of the holiday season or not), we are seem to be very busy this semester – so much so that we never have enough time to work during the week and we end up spending a lot of time working on weekends, and we’ve had to spend a lot of time cleaning up / making changes to the deliverables on top of that.

Thankfully, it seems like we have finally been able to overcome most of these challenges but our workflow is still far from optimal. What I really like about this situation is that this really is the first time I am on a team with issues and that puts a different perspective on the team-building books I had to read during my first year, it went from a concept I could only relate to vaguely to a process I have to live and learn through.

All in all, even though its been a challenging course, I’ve still loved the course content, and really enjoyed the meat of the class. Thankfully, as a team, we have made a lot of progress and we should end up being successful in this class.

posted by Rom Lemarchand @ 4:07 PM 

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