The April 2021 tech talk was presented by Gerardo Lopez
Abstract:
Software technology is huge and seems complex, but it really isn’t: every technology is just an enormous bunch of small pieces (each only a few characters long). It is impossible for anyone to understand everything, but successful software implementations can be achieved with a thorough understanding of the “small set of pieces” required to solve a given problem.
To create a good software solution to address a given problem, we first must formulate a good understanding of that problem — specifically, we need to discover the structure of the problem. Good software should model the problem’s structure, thus making it easy to debug and maintain.
Engineering techniques to achieve this were invented many years ago, and many programmers and organizations were successful in applying this knowledge. These engineering techniques are easy to learn, but are not used widely enough by software engineers today.
About the Presenter
Gerardo Lopez
Gerardo is an entrepreneur, businessman, and software engineer with more than 45 years of experience in transforming software development to well-established software engineering practices in order to achieve top quality and reduce development cost and time.
Gerardo holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Tec de Monterrey, and spent two years working for a Master of Arts degree in Computer Sciences at Texas University.
From 1982 through 2000, he founded and grew Softtek, a software development company in Mexico, to become the largest in Latin America. In 2002, he started Towa with the vision to excel in software quality and lead Mexico to become #1 in software quality in the world (“Mexico should achieve in software what the Japanese did in car manufacturing 60 years ago”). Gerardo is currently serving the SEA as leader of the Content Creation working group.
