On the behalf of my current customer I went to PLM Europe in Frankfurt on October 9-11, a UGS User conference. UGS is one of the major suppliers of software supporting product life-cycle management (actually meaning parts, articles, hardware). After visiting three days of presentations and workshops, some more marketing than workshops, some mediocre and some really inspiring, I found that many things being said was also applicable to software. But there are genuinely different properties in software and software based products which this branch of the engineering business has yet not understood. I also realized that replacing the first letter in the PLM acronym with an A gets you ALM, Application Life-cycle Management, which has created some whoa lately. I guess I’ll have to dive into that area also.
Thomas Nilefalk on Responsive Development of Software, Systems and Organizations