Carnegie Mellon West Software Management Blog
Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read along as our students chronicle their journey through the MS in Software Management program.
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Chandra is a second-year grad student, a Director, Product Strategy at Oracle, a dedicated father and husband, and he plays a mean game of Wii Tennis. Check back often to read his new insights! |
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Dan is an IT Systems Architect at Boeing and a first-year grad student in the MS Software Management program. He loves reading , biking, and hanging out with friends over a cup of coffee. Most importantly though, he loves education! And thinks the ability to learn is one of the greatest things about people. His favorite quote is “A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.”
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Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Metrics Class - Collaboration and Teamwork
This really was an eye-opening course. The purpose of this course was to learn how to design metrics in general, and then recommend metrics for projects and large portfolios of projects. In the past, I’ve had to collect data or present existing metrics to the management team at my company. However, I never thought of questioning or refining the metric itself; let alone think about actionable items or worry about leading vs. trailing metrics.
Another twist to the design of metrics was the introduction of agile and hybrid software methodologies. Part of my assignment was to read and understand the various software methodologies in a relatively short duration to successfully submit the deliverables on time. My team had earlier worked on Extreme Programming as part of their software development projects and helped me get up to speed.
What was really neat about this course was the fact that our class merged with students from Carnegie Mellon West’s other degree program, the MS Software Engineering Development Management track. This made for an interesting experiment as people with varying backgrounds were grouped. These were second-year students who had on average 5 years of industry experience and had already mastered the art of collaboration and planning for the task.
It was an amazing experience to work as part of this team. In this course, I did not have to spend more than 12 to 15 hours each week. We were able to form a cohesive and high performing team rather quickly, ensuring that the work load was fairly distributed.
In the second week of class, during our second plenary session, we had the privilege of hearing from Dr. Sunita Chulani, IBM, who spoke on "IT Governance”.
Observations
I realize that the use of wiki as a learning and collaboration tool at Carnegie Mellon West is one of the things that sets itself apart from other universities. It encourages the use of modern collaborative tools as part of the curriculum. Hopefully, students will encourage and implement these tools in their respective organizations for creating collaborative environment for structured and unstructured data.
Overall, I experienced team and problem-based learning, collaboration tools, project and portfolio management, software engineering concepts for agile and hybrid projects, persuasive communication – written and oral, and metrics design all brought together in this seven-week course.
posted by Carnegie Mellon West @ 4:42 PM
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