Different from other mature fields of engineering, such as civil engineering and electrical engineering, the field of software engineering lacks established ways to help developing professional’s credentials. What does it means to be a professionally qualified software engineer? How do you get there? In recent years, a number of software engineering certification programs comes to address these issues. IEEE Computer Society Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP) Program is among them and provides a solid path to software engineering certification.

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Services Computing is an emerging cross discipline that addresses how to make good use of software, computing, and information technologies to help people doing business services more effectively and efficiently. It involves modeling, creation, operation, and management of business services.

I think about this term when I read IEEE Computer Magazine October 2005 issue about 2006 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing. The conference has three major research tracks: Foundations of Services Computing, Services-Centric Business Models, and Business Process Integration and Management. The conference theme is “Services, Solutions, and Business Models of Services Computing”.

To learn more concrete and practical about software requirements management (RM), I searched the Web to find some requirements management tools. In the beginning, I reached this website: Requirement Management Tools, which provides a list of 36 requirement management tools. By my heuristic guessing, I selected some tools to visit and finally found the following RM tool very good and professional. I think it is sufficiently good for learning purpose.

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Introduction to Software Requirements (Catherine Connor)

This is a good presentation that introduces Software Requirement. The author is with the Rational Software of IBM Software Group and a worldwide technical marketing and requirements specialist. I would recommend this to Software Engineering students. It is also good for review purpose.

Paul Graham recently gave a keynote speech on Oscon 2005 (O’Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005 - Portland, Oregon). I listened to his talk via IT Conversations. Here is the link: Paul Graham - An OSCON 2005 Keynote.

Graham pointed out and discussed the three big lessons that business can learn from open source and blogging.
(1) People work harder on stuff they like.
(2) The standard office environment is very unproductive.
(3) Bottom-up often works better than top-down.

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I know there are a large number of UML Modeling Tools available to suit different needs and cater for different markets. You can easily get a list of them by searching the Web, for example, here, here, and here.

In my journey of finding a good one for my Software Engineering students, I gave the following three products a try: Poseidon for UML Community Edition, Visual Paradigm for UML Community Edition, and Omondo EclipseUML Free Edition. They are all developed by large companies or organizations specialized in UML modeling software. The community edition or free edition provides the basic functionalities and is available free for non-commercial use. I gave Visual Paradigm for UML a try because it is a product by a Hong Kong company. The following details how to get and install them. (more…)