This week I had the pleasure to participate in Swedsoft‘s Software Technology Exchange Workshop (STEW) and it was a blast! Or at least it was very informative, the food was great and the people were friendly. I listened to almost 20 different talks on various topics on software engineering so now I’m filled up with knowledge. 😉

To be able to digest all this knowledge I thought I could write down the most memorable notes I took and give some comments where needed. Of course, these notes, paraphrases and comments will only be a drop in the gravy ocean from STEW. Text in italics are things I thought I heard while unformatted text are my own comments and explanations.

Miscellaneous

It is all software. The electronics and mechanical engineers are lost! – Words from a CTO of a big company. Said with tongue in cheek, but gives a somewhat accurate description of how  some hardware industries are becoming more dependent on software.

Featuritis – 70-80% of features in the product are never used!

Model based [testing/development/systems engineering] – A trend during STEW was to talk about making all things model based.

5G

Sensors everywhere!

25.2 Gbit/s throughput – From an Ericsson experiment performed in Barcelona.

100x higher rate, 1000x higher volume, 5x lower latency, 100x more devices! –
Compared to, I assume, 4G.

Eiffel

The Eiffel framework was originally developed by Ericsson. It is a framework that ”enables technology agnostic enterprise scale continuous integration and delivery.”

Every change in a software project is an event.

Events hold references to other, previous events. This creates a real time directed acyclic graph.

Eiffel is used to document what we did, who did it, why we did it and how we did it.

With Eiffel you may store, analyze and visualize the documentation.

Eiffel is available on GitHub!

Jan Bosch – The hurricane

Mr Bosch spoke about speed, data and ecosystem. Focus was on speed, and he spoke very fast.

Increasing speed trumps any other R&D improvement! Speed beats efficiency every time.

Facebook started in 2004 and gained 50M users in 44 months, Angry birds was released in 2009 and gained 50M users in 1 month!

Continuous delivery is for fegisar! – Not sure what this was about, but it spurred a lot of laughs.

Candy crush analyzes player behavior to increase revenue. – Is the player stuck? Is he/she likely to make a purchase to get unstuck? Use user data to your advantage!

C.I. needs to improve. […] Booking.com can rollback in 8 seconds!

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.  – Steve Jobs

Bosch will release a book by Christmas, probably about speed!

[1] Bosch, Jan. ”Tutorial summary for speed, data and ecosystems: The future of software
engineering.” Software Architecture (WICSA), 2016 13th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on. IEEE, 2016.

Summary

To summarize STEW 2016, I will give a short list of pros and cons. Although I may not be able to put it to words, my overall impression with STEW is overwhelmingly positive.

Pros

• Great way of bringing industry and academia together.
• As a student I got to learn things that you simply won’t get to know in school.
• Very good fika!

Cons

• I would love to see more ”software companies” and not just the big dragons SAAB and Ericsson. Maybe DICE, Klarna, King, Mojang or Spotify can join in on the fun?
• It was way too cold for comfort in the lecture hall, Vallfarten, at LiU.