During the last SEPG Europe Conference held in Oporto I had the opportunity, together with Pedro Castro Henriques from Strongstep, to talk with Dr. Paul Nielsen, Director and CEO of the Software Engineering Institute.

Length: – 14:26m
You can download the show (in english) or subscribe the podcast feed (mainly in portuguese).
There is also the full transcript available.

We talked about the conference itself, that for the first time came to Portugal, the fact that was being held at an university and how that relationship is interesting for the SEI, according to Paul Nielsen, “It kind of shows a stronger relationship to university life and to research universities, which is part of our mission anyway and it’s bringing out a different kind of people to some extent (…)”.

We also talked about one of the important subjects on this conference, the relation between CMMI and Agile Methodologies, and although they are often seen as being radically different approaches on software development, to Paul Nielsen they are complimentary, he said “in fact CMMI and agile work together very well, because CMMI is sort of a overarching technique for how the organization is organized whereas most of the agile techniques or even our own team software process are things aimed right at the individual programmer and the groups of programmers”.

And finally we discussed the importance of connecting the SEI with its customers: “SEI doesn’t develop this work in a vacuum, we’re in full contact with the broad community, and even as we bring stuff to the community, we learn from the community (…)”

Disclaimer: this interview was made possible with the support of Strongstep – Innovation in Software Quality. Strongstep is a consultancy firm within process improvement, namely in the CMMI/TSP field and attracted the SEPG Europe event for the first time to Portugal, sponsoring what is the largest software engineer conference in Europe.