Architecting Usability
Hugh Beyer, cofounder/CTO of InContext and co-inventor of the Contextual Design process
Monday, July 17, 12:30pm - 1:30pm

Usability as a discipline has become a vital part of any systems development effort. From initial concept through final user acceptance, usability and user-centered design ensure that systems fit users' needs. But many organizations still find usability difficult to fit into the development methodology, and it's given short shrift by architects and developers. Hugh Beyer, a pioneer in promoting customer-centered design, discusses usability in the large: the user-centered activities critical to defining the right system for the right audience. Beyer will survey key approaches, including his own methods of Contextual Inquiry and Contextual Design. He'll show how user work practice itself can be modeled and represented explicitly, and how these models can drive requirements and systems design.

Good Modeling, Good Governance
Dr. Murray Cantor, IBM distinguished engineer, member of the Rational Software CTO team and author
Tuesday, July 18, 12:30pm - 1:30pm

Governance consists of establishing decision rights and responsibilities, and measures and controls. As we all know, the governance of software development provides special challenges. Poor governance impedes developers; good governance empowers developers. Yet how do we ensure that our projects are governed well? In this talk, IBM Distinguished Engineer Dr. Murray Cantor discusses the dynamics of software development projects and how modeling plays a critical role in the effective governance of development.

Securing Software Design and Architecture: Uncut and Uncensored
Herbert Thompson, Chief Security Strategist, Security Innovation
Wednesday, July 19, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM

With software running the world’s most critical business processes, it’s essential to understand both its utility and the risk it can bring to those processes. We need to design for functionality, yet constrain behavior so that software is not just secure but is manageably secure in the enterprise. In this presentation, Dr. Herbert Thompson, author of numerous books on software security, shares the results of a multiyear study on how software fails with respect to security. This keynote vividly illustrates the major categories of vulnerabilities with live demonstrations of the most pressing and current security issues in software with an eye on how tackle many of them during system design.

Beyond UML, Erds and DFDs: The Evolution of Modeling in the Next Decade
Edward Yourdon, internationally recognized computer consultant and author
Thursday, July 20, 2006, 9:00am - 10:00am

In the beginning, there were flowcharts which everyone hated. In the 1980s, we had dataflow diagrams (DFDs), entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs) and structure charts. The 1990s brought us CASE, with foolish promises of automating the transition from diagrams to executable code. Then came OO analysis and design, with its class diagrams, use-case diagrams and the overwhelming detail of UML. So what's next? Ed Yourdon, who created several of these modeling notations, and survived others, looks into his crystal ball, and tells us what kind of systems modeling techniques we should expect in the decade ahead. Some, like the modeling of business processes, may use tools and notations that are familiar; others, like the modeling of system dynamics, will use methods familiar to academics that are generally ignored by the IT industry. Perhaps the most important evolution will be "extemporaneous models" of "ad hoc" systems, which more and more organizations are creating from open-source components, XML, RSS and other Internet technologies. As Mr. Yourdon will demonstrate, system developers may not have the time or resources to create formal models of such systems in advance, but it will be critically important to create such models "on-the-fly," as the systems "emerge," so that they can be maintained and trusted for mission-critical applications.