Sunday, June 11, 2006

1st class - distance learning

Believe it or not I'm a student again. Classes have begun for me in the form of distance learning. This is the first course of CMU's Master in Soft. Engineering (and the first distance course I ever take in my life). The course will be about the Personal Software Process (PSP), basically a way to measure one's personal effort and improve on it. It draws on the basics of the CMM and applies forces you to log your coding, design and testing time, defect types and where they were fixed etc., un hopes of doing a better job at estimating your future development efforts.

For the course I was given a DVD with recorded lectures that I have to watch on certain days with addition to reading some chapters from the "A Discipline for Software Engineering" from Watts Humphrey. Every week we also get into a java based virtual classroom where we basically chat and ask questions to our instructor. So far there has been nothing really new except some statistics. Hope it gets more useful down the road.