Dr Martin Dietze, discussing Individual Software Projects – from Tender to Rollout

Dermalog is a company specialising in bio-metric systems which involve fingerprint and facial identification to be able to see if an individual’s identity can be verified. The systems are widely deployed on bio-metric border control scanners for automatic facial and finger verification in countries such as Singapore and Cambodia. A search-based method is used when identifying an individual in a database of strangers, which can be computationally expensive as more data is involved the more parallel processes are needed for faster computation.

Based on his own personal experience as a system architect, Dr Dietze’s talk focuses on the life cycle issues of developing systems of such complex nature. Martin started his talk on obtaining a tender documenting the scope of work required. A feature list is then complied and once approved, development can begin, along with the technical architectures by the development team. Version control systems play a central role in providing a structured repository for project source codes, files and documents. Systems of this kind provide retention to the previous/ older versions of the project in support to continuous integration. This in turn requires automatic testing on codes within a controlled environment, signalled by green and red markers. The code quality is measured by the percentage of effectiveness and errors. After the development team has completed the system configuration for the rollout; the requirements for first, second and third level support are then identified within a service license agreement. Operations then take over to monitor the progress of the rollout and correct any detected errors.

This seminar encouraged students and staff alike to explore the process of software rollout and the values involved as well as rigorous quality and version controls within real-world scenarios. The talk exposes issues with software project development and management in reality.

Guest speakers presenting at the School of Computing give postgraduate and undergraduate students an insight into their research, showing them range of research projects which have been undertaken. This is an opportunity to broaden their understanding of computing and identify areas of interest for further study. All are encouraged to attend.

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