Bangalore: The IBM Innovate 2011 saw tech savvy professionals gather at The Leela Palace Kempinsky to 'get skilled', 'get informed', and to 'get smarter'. The expectations were high as the 2000 odd crowd took their seats in the impressive ball rooms and by the end of the conference one could only say the sessions superceded the expectations. It was a two-day technical extravaganza held on 10th & 11th August was flocked by professionals who celebrated technology, lived it and loved it.
An impressive line up of speakers from IBM spoke on some of the most relevant issues today such as application lifecycle management, strategic planning and software economy.
Dr Kristof Kloeckner, General Manager of IBM Rational, started off the 2 day long conference with an impressive talk on Software Innovation: The competitive advantage. He shared the secret behind the driving principles that the successful companies adopt to transform software services and delivery. The leading companies, Kristof said, follow the mantra of INNOVATE, COLLABORATE and OPTIMIZE.
They innovate Software data and tools, connecting processes and information spanning an entire lifecycle, collaborate by unifying teams across geographies, cultures and sometimes across different organizations. By Unifying , Kristof meant that the market leaders create a sense of common purpose and allow them to very quickly react to the changing market needs based on integrated information and lifecycle traceability.
Kristof spoke on Jazz, a new technology platform for collaborative software delivery "Supporting an ecosystem and a community of programmers , around applications and system life cycle management is very important to us. The foundation of our portfolio is really open lifecycle collaboration, based on a set of technologies, based on a platform, on an architecture, that we call Jazz," he said.
This in turn allows these companies to optimize their risk and investment, simplifying their governance and measuring how they are performing Kristof observed.
Talking about measurements, Walker Royce delivered an eye opening session on 'How to improve software economics through measurements.' The Chief Software Economist of IBM Rational, who is also an author of a book, made public some path breaking and startling revelations challenging the basics of the existing software work culture.
Walker said Software is more an economic discipline than an engineering discipline. To substantiate on his stand he said, "Engineering has laws of physics and materials that we base our methods and judgments on, whereas in case of software the decisions we make are 'value' judgments, where we need statistics and business analytics to make forecasts."
Software was called a 'very large piece of intellectual property' by Walker, that is mostly bounded by human imaginations collectively amongst a team of users, developers and stake holders. The laws of engineering and consequently the engineering methods don't work very well on software.
In most Software projects, about 40 percent of effort is consumed in construct, scrap and rework, which is caused by the inability to deal with the uncertainty early on in the lifecycle. While the solution for this Walker said is to optimize anything that we are able to measure, and that is where measurement is increasingly important.
He continued on the solution further when he said in order to reduce and manage uncertainty, one must plan for integration testing before the unit testing, this way we can resolve the architecturally significant issues.
The caution, Walker said, was to avoid the 'false' precision. 'All the extra investment in false precision turns into future scrap, and re-work, and it is deadly'. Walker concluded by saying the honest metrics come from measuring how the code in test case changes.
Bete Demeke, Vice President, World wide sale of IBM Rational started the final keynote session with a brief history of all the technology waves our world has seen staring at from the steam engines to the latest wave of smart products and smarter services.
He pointed that with each one of the waves has undeniably had an impact on the world economy and also the rate of adoption of each new wave is accelerating. To elaborate on his points Bete used the example of how steam engine took a century to become a mainstream technology around the world. Radio took 37 years to reach 50 million households, TV took 13 and internet took only 4 to do the same.
In all the era's of technological change one fact that remained constant accrding to Bete was that those who wanted to be the leaders were the quickest to adopt the agile strategy. He used agile, in the sense of the word. Bete said that Software is the today, the invisible tissue that binds the world, but he also questioned when we are going to take advantage of it.
"Software must be made use of to harness all that information and it must be used to take intelligent business decisions," concluded Bete.
Suman Sathyanarayan who works with Keane felt the conference was informative "The quality of the keynote sessions was really high, I am very much looking forward to the rest of the sessions" she said.
Praveen and Suresh who were overzealous about the technical sessions said that the conference has provided them with the push and motivation that they needed and they wanted to take the lessons they'd learnt, back with them to TCS for better scalability then before. In addition to all the software gyaan they gained, the gathering was treated to a rock show in the evening and two lucky winners also walked away with a blackberry and a Nokia cell phone.
The event was partnered by Tata Communications, buzzintown, SiliconIndia, Zest, Barista, Fastrack, Olive beach and Harley Davidson motor cycles.
