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MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read about our students' experiences through the MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track program.

Rahul is a full-time MS Software Engineering, Technical Track student. He loves traveling, trekking, swimming and is a complete movie buff.
Anthony is a 2nd year part time student in the MS Software Engineering, Technical track program and works at OSIsoft as a Software Engineer. He loves spending time with his family, hiking, biking, gardening, cooking, and sometimes photography.
Suma is an alumna of the MS Software Engineering, Technical Track program. A Mechanical Engineering undergrad, she loves writing and is passionate about music, shopping and dogs.
Minh is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft and alumnus of the MS Software Engineering program. He is also a Vietnamese community activist, a cat-lover and passionate fan of film music.
Nick is a Software Engineer at Google and a first-year grad student at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. He loves hiking, gaming, and both really extremely good and extremely bad movies.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

What's been happening


It's been a long time since I last wrote anything here, as I've been overwhelmed in all kinds of ways. Luckily, I'm back on top of things, as another half-semester is in the books and a new one is getting underway. What I finished was a course in Avoiding Software Project Failures, which I loved. We had a number of case studies of real world projects that failed miserably, for a wide range of reasons. While many of the problems they encountered were predictable, many other ones were not. Seeing these examples is something that I know will help me avoid such failures in the future.

Now we've moved on to the Metrics for Software Engineers course, which is a change of pace compared to the Failures course. Here, the focus is on figuring out what metrics are useful in making plans and monitoring projects, with the caveat that 80% of metric initiatives applied end in failure in current companies. So it seems like figuring out how to do these metrics initiatives well is up against long odds, but doing it well is a pretty rare feat. I'll get back to work to finish out this semester and enjoy a much-deserved winter break, where I'll enjoy not having work or school to do.

posted by Nick Lynn @ 10:03 AM 

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