In this webinar get innovative ideas and practical tips from recognized software development thought leaders as they share their experience and field your questions live. You will also learn about tools, technologies and practices that can help you improve and develop better quality software.

1. Webinar
Making Software:
What Works & Why
We Really Believe It
Twitter: #ASQBear
Hosts: Greg Wilson and Andy Oram
Editors of “Making Software”

2. Greg Wilson
Greg Wilson is the chief scientist on Software Carpentry,
an intensive introduction to fundamental computational
skills for scientists and engineers. He has worked over
the past 25 years in high-performance scientific
computing, data visualization, and computer security,
and has been on the editorial board of Doctor Dobb's
Journal and Computing in Science and Engineering. His
most recent books are Data Crunching (Pragmatic,
2005), Beautiful Code (O'Reilly, 2007), and Practical
Programming (Pragmatic, 2009). Greg received a Ph.D.
in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.

3. Agenda
 Introductions
 Making Software
– Surprising Truths and Myths
 Panel discussion
 Q+A

4. FAQ
 Questions
– You can submit questions at any time
– “Questions” feature in GoToWebinar Panel.
 Twitter: Share the event live using #ASQBear
 Replay will be available at SmartBear.com

5. Greg’s Suprises
There's a lot more empirical research out there on software
SURPRISE 1 development than most people realize (certainly more than *I*
had realized).
A lot of it is immediately actionable. Ball and Nagappan's
SURPRISE 2 results showing that physical distance between developers
doesn't matter nearly as much as their distance in the org
chart, for example, or the data that Hassan and Herraiz
summarize showing that all the fancy code metrics people
have proposed are statistically no better than just counting
lines of code.
I've always found it ironic that programmers build wonderful
SURPRISE 3 rich tools for other people (like CAD systems or WYSIWYG
page layout editors), but insist on using things themselves
that are only a small advance on the VT100 terminal.

6. Andy Oram
Andy Oram is an editor at the technical
publisher and information provider
O'Reilly Media, specializing currently in
open source, programming, and
software engineering. Andy, along with
Greg, is the editor of Making Software.

7. Andy’s Suprises
SURPRISE 1
How good the software engineers recruited for the
book were at writing.
The sensitivity of results to the programmers’
SURPRISE 2 environments.
The sensitivity of results to learning effects on
SURPRISE 3 repeated experiments

8. Marian Petre
Marian Petre has been conducting empirical
studies of expert software developers and high-
performing software teams for over 20 years.
She’s studied software visualisation, graphical
and textual program representations, paradigms,
disciplines of innovation, and a host of other
topics. Marian is Prof. of Computing at the Open
University in the UK and a Royal Society
Wolfson Research Merit Award holder.

9. Marian’s Suprises
Experts don't program in programming languages or
SURPRISE 1 paradigms.
Pictures are only reliably worth 1000 words if they're
SURPRISE 2 accompanied by them.
Experts practice creativity - deliberately
SURPRISE 3

10. Hakan Erdogmus
Based in Ottawa, Canada, Dr. Hakan
Erdogmus is an independent consultant,
researcher, and educator specialized in
software process. He is Editor in Chief of IEEE
Software, founder of Kalemun Research Inc.,
and adjunct professor of Computer Science at
the University of Calgary. Read about him at
thingssoftware.com.

11. Hakan’s Suprises
¬(Productivity ∝ 1/Quality)
SURPRISE 1
Understanding & variability of techniques
SURPRISE 2 differ widely.
Empirical results are interpreted differently by
SURPRISE 3 differently readers.

12. Jason Cohen
Jason Cohen is the founder of the original
Smart Bear Software, makers of
CodeCollaborator, the most popular peer
code review tool. He’s the author of Best
Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review, and the
founder of three other companies including
WPEngine and ITWatchDogs. He blogs
regularly at ASmartBear.com.

13. Jason’s Surprise’s
Self-review works. 50% strength,
SURPRISE 1 but 50% less time too.
Meetings don't uncover new bugs.
SURPRISE 2
Checklists with 1-3 items are more
SURPRISE 3 effective than with 30.

14. Diomidis Spinellis
Diomidis Spinellis is a Professor of Software
Engineering at the Athens University of
Economics and Business. He has written the
two award-winning “Open Source Perspective”
books: Code Reading and Code Quality, and is
contributing the IEEE Software Tools of the
Trade column. Diomidis is the developer of
UMLGraph and a four time winner of the
International Obfuscated C Code Contest.

15. Diomidi’s Suprises
Good abstractions carry you farther than planned.
SURPRISE 1
Working on other peoples' code is easier than it
SURPRISE 2 appears.
Performance issues are not where you expect them.
SURPRISE 3

16. Panel Discussion
ANDY ORAM GREG WILSON MARIAN PETRE
DIOMIDIS SPINELLIS JASON COHEN HAKAN ERDOGMUS

17. Questions?