In a drive to address the absence in the IT industry of a sustainable best-practice forum for application development, MGX will once again be hosting its best-practice seminars in March and April.
The 90-minute workshops will present the latest reports and insights on a diverse spectrum of software development topics using industry specialists and guest speakers from inside the industry, to provide attendees with the most current information on software development and management techniques. The workshops will have an unusually broad appeal for a range of practitioners - including business managers, project managers and developers - currently working on software projects.
Derek Hughes, MD Software Development says: "Previous industry-type forums have started well but faltered when the job commitments of committee members became too demanding. We ran two such seminars last year and they have begun to build the momentum the industry needs."
Issues to be addressed include how to construct a business case for a software project, how to manage risk development in a particular language, such as Java, and database design and architecture.
Bill Dunn, a principal consultant for MGX and speaker at the forum, says a number of new trends were identified and discussed at the last two seminars held in November last year.
He adds that feedback received from the initial two seminars held in 2000, covering best practice in software development and process and the critical chain, illustrated a shift in the focus of developers from "an achieved acceptance of object-oriented development towards interest in specific technologies and core development issues".
Dunn notes that these issues include:
How to go about monitoring best practices in software development; and
How to grade management, technical and project delivery issues in the future.
Dunn stresses that the next series of forums has been set up in response to the degree of support given by the software development community.
Looking at "hot button" topics for 2001, he says the keyword is integration as established and new businesses look to optimise interoperability between back-end processes and newer delivery systems such as XML messaging and WAP.
"Yet," says Dunn, "the delivery system is secondary because there are many messaging options to choose from. The emphasis should rather be on integrating existing data and giving system access to as many users as possible."
This integration trend will be driven by e-business and the huge software development effort required to integrate portals for use by employees, trading partners and consumers, concludes Dunn.
The next seminars take place on 15 March and 5 April. The topic will be capturing requirements and discovering objects from requirements, presented by Bill Dunn.
The seminars will be held MGX offices at 12 Saddle Drive, Woodmead Park.
Attendance is on a first-come, first-served basis and each session begins at 4:30 pm and ends at 6pm.
RSVP Charmaine Nzama; tel (011) 808 3400; charmainen@cch.co.za.
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