Today is the start of our last trimester of formal course work, after this we only have a capstone project to work on and graduation in May, finally. I am taking a project management class from the supply chain management department. The department is very well regarded within our School of Business so I am looking forward to this course. As usual, given it is a business class we are on a five week compressed schedule so things will move in a hurry. A lot of reading and plenty of discussion drive this course, I might even post a few things here just to keep them handy.

The other class is from the computer science department so it falls under the normal 10 week schedule. Given the holiday break we have in December, the class runs through the middle of February. The class is named Modeling and Simulation and I am certainly trying to understand just the title of the course. This only means I have yet more reading to get done!

I started this entry a couple of weeks ago shortly after I submitted my assignment. At the time I had some specific ideas to post but, of course, they are gone. Instead of deleting this entry altogether, I will post my summary as submitted.

I just finished reading over Michael Porter’s "Strategy and the Internet" as an assignment for one of my courses. Part of the assignment included a brief summary of our thoughts about the role that strategy play in today’s Internet environment and if we agreed with Porter.

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I turned in my final exam last night which marked the halfway point for my Master’s program at ASU. One year down and one more to go. Since there is no rest for the weary, today we started our new trimester. For the next three trimesters we’ll be taking one business class and one engineering class, a combination just as demanding as two engineering classes since the business courses are 5 week crash courses!

Our business class is Strategic Technology Management, which takes an inside look at the role of strategy in today’s technology driven companies. Our first reading is Michael Porter’s Strategy and the Internet where we take a look at the role of Internet technologies in a company’s strategies. I think it will be a very good class with a balance combination of technology and business theories.

Our engineering class is called Testing Real Time Systems. I am not sure that I can give you as good as a description as the previous course but this is mostly because we don’t have much insight into what this course will be like. I do know that we’ll be creating and testing a technical specification for a video game to run on Windows PC. I guess it will be a fun project with semi-real world applications.

This past friday night I finished my Business Policy class so now I only have four weeks left of Software Project, Process and Quality Management to end this school term. One of the things that I liked the most about the business class was to be able to look into the non-technical side of things with regards to high-profile companies.

The course was very very reading intensive and I barely managed to stay afloat with the reading but fortunately our assignments were team-based so we helped each other out to accomplish each task. Our "big project" was an industry analysis and we decided to take a look inside the online music industry. We also looked into the details that lead to the Ford transformation during the mid 80’s and the strategy that put Nucor Steel ahead of other steel manufactures. Definetely quite a learning experience.

In one of my current classes we dicussed some of the metrics used to quantify software quality. One of such metrics is "defects per 1,000 lines of code." The current average in enterprise software is said to be about 1 to 3 defects per 1K lines of code. Not a whole lot until you start thinking about the millions of lines that make up the software in today’s airplanes, medical machines, your car’s break system, etc.