October 26, 2009. Three lectures. “Software development methodologies and techniques through the years”

Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

Earlier this year I was invited by prof. Arno Oosterhaven to do a series of lectures on software development at the post-doctoral program IT Auditor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. The audience of IT Auditors is very mixed, ranging from accountants to actual software developers, which makes it difficult to address all interests of the students.

However, I managed to put together a nice program of six lectures, where I delved into the archives of software development. For the first three lectures, I did an overview of nice topics:

• Software development methodologies, starting with Winston Royce’s famous white paper, going through SDM, spiral models, RUP and ending at agile methodologies, of course including DSDM, XP, Scrum, Smart.
• Software analysis and design techniques, starting at DFD’s and PSD’s (do you stil remember these?), flow charts (did you know these were invented in 1921?) and on through UML and BPMN.
• (Smart) use cases. Of course, would I leave home without them?

Although people came from very differte backgrounds, the students seemed to like the material offered. Got good response.