SEVOCAB: Software and Systems Engineering Vocabulary

Find authoritative definitions for software and systems engineering terms in SEVOCAB. A project of the IEEE Computer Society and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC7, SEVOCAB includes definitions from international standards. You can search for a term as defined in the standards, or for all the definitions in a source standard.

To give you an understanding of related concepts, SEVOCAB will return any definition for the term, as well as all the definitions that use the term.

Visit http://www.computer.org/sevocab to search or download the vocabulary.

TWIN e-Book Volume 1

Volume 1 of the TWIN e-book is available for free download at http://www.twin-india.org/.

It is an enormous effort to compile posts from past 5 years at the TWIN mailing list into a useful, searchable, downloadable e-book. Read more about the effort, planning and the team at http://infodeveloper.wordpress.com/tag/twin-book/ .

It's amazing what you can achieve with merely an idea, leadership and volunteers.

STC 2008 Conference in Pune

Some of us are attending STC India's 10th Annual conference this Friday (12th) and Saturday (13th Dec 2008) at Le Meridien, Pune.

About the Conference

After a 4-year hiatus, the STC India conference returns to the burgeoning metropolis of Pune for a historic third time. The STC India conference is the largest gathering of technical communicators in the country. On December 12 and 13, 2008, the thriving city of Pune (Maharashtra) will play host to the technical communication fraternity from across the country, and even the world. Read more..."

Related sites: Society for Technical Communication (STC), Technical Writers of India (TWIN).

Error in Perforce: Can't clobber writable files

I use Perforce for source control of the Teamcenter documentation files. Today, I noticed some files were revised and checked-in by other users. When I tried to get the latest version of the files by Sync to Head Revision, Perforce gave the following error:

"Can't clobber writable file..."

I found it was because some of the files on my local drive were not in read-only mode. Its a known fact that when we check-in a file after modifications, Perforce marks our local copy of the file read-only. However, in this case, it was not known why that did not happen. It assumed that since the local file was not in read-only mode, the file was open for edit. If Perforce allowed the Sync to Head Revision, the files could have been corrupted.

The solution was to manually mark my local copies of the files read-only. On Sync to Head Revision now, Perforce did not throw any error message.

Click here to read about other users who encountered the same error message and their possible causes.

Why Another Blog - Part 2

I look back at this outdated blog - mysoa corp at http://mysoa.blogspot.com/ - I started only for the purpose stated below. Today, I've moved on to different jobs, aspirations, and faced challenges. So, here we have, a new purpose and address. I wish it were this simple to re-invent and move on with many other things in life!

Get ready to read about my career spread across several jobs, dilemmas, and official trivia.

For the sake of history, here's why I started this blog originally.

Automated Technical Writing?

The other day, we had an interesting discussion on minimalism and the future of Technical Writing (TW).

Someone said the way the standards and guides are being framed, there would be a day when TW would have templates and almost no scope for errors.

• Does it mean TW is moving towards automation? 
• Can TW be automated at all? It would be definitely beneficial to someone. Who would benefit the most if TW is automated? Is it the documentation itself, end-users, writers, project schedules or budgets?
• Does it mean minimal intervention from the writers?
• Or, do you think a human writer would always hold an edge, and rise like a phoenix with new skills? (Well, talking about the future skills is another discussion in the pipeline!)

How to Make Great Presentations

Source: How to Captivate an Audience from How to Change the World by GuyKawasaki.

An extract:

"The four horsemen (horse-people?) of presentation skills are Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, Bert Decker, and Jerry Weisman. Over at the American Express Open Forum blog, I just published an interview with Nancy Duarte called "How to Captivate an Audience." In this interview she explains the"how" of making great presentations, so check it out."

Business Analyst Blog

8 Hints to Applying for the CBAP

Systems thinking

An Extract From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

•

Systems thinking is a unique approach to problem solving, in that it views certain 'problems' as a part of the overall system so focusing on these outcomes will only further develop the undesired element or problem. Systems thinking is a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system will act differently when the systems relationships are removed and it is viewed in isolation. The only way to fully understand why a problem or element occurs and persists is to understand the part in relation to the whole.

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Meeting on Center of Excellence - Extracts

Source: http://www.soa-consortium.org/podcasts-webcasts/podcast-DC2008-coe.htm
Center of Excellence: Speakers and Roundtable / SOA Consortium Meeting, March 13, 2008
The 3 panelists - Bruce Henderson of Savant, David Butler of HP, Richard Reba of CSC, and Melvin Greer of Lockheed Martin - were asked to answer 4 questions in respect to SOA Center of Excellence.

1. The first is what are the three most critical skills that you should staff in your SOA COE?
2. The second is where do those skills come from?
3. How do you develop those skills or find those skills on the street?
4. And then what is any skill that they often see in the Center of Excellence that really just does not belong there?

Some interesting answers:

• Vision, Politics/Business/Management, Communication
• Business, technology, and management skills, first of all.
• Foresight, Innovation, Leadership - "True leadership is when the rest of the organization does not necessarily report to you, yet you are able to influence change within the organization anyway. So that combination is very important..."
• Passion, "people people", tenacity - "...You have got to hang on through some very challenging times..."
• Entrepreneurial ability
• "...you need people who are familiar with the culture and the way that the organization works..."
• "...You have to have somebody who is actually a practitioner if you want to build a competency center."
• "...The most important one that we find very difficult to get people to do it is design for reuse. Design for reuse simply means being able to build something today that is coarse-grained enough that somebody else can easily pick it up and use it, but actually deliver some technical functionality that is tied to a business process."
• "Now the thing that I do not necessarily want in my competency center, that I struggle sometimes with, is vendor representation. I love our vendor partners because they provide us tools, and they provide us insight, and they help us understand capabilities. But what I am finding is that they want to hijack my competency center."