About Me

Hello World!

My name is Varokas, but I usually go by my given nickname ‘Non’. I was born and raised in Thailand for almost all my life. I have been around computers since I was 13 years old — a real first class geek you may say. I entered the world of software cranking workforce in 2007, facing the truth of inefficient commercial software development. Deeply believe that things could be much better, I began to get myself familiar with this dark art we called Software Engineering.

After confusingly self-taught myself for a while, I decided to go to Carnegie Mellon to get a full-time education in Software Engineering. I met a lot of interesting minds from around the world. We all shared the same slogan of being an ‘agent of change’ to the world of software crafting.

Here’s my first step towards being agent of change. To share what I learned, experienced, accomplished, failed about SE so far and all that will come in the future. Because software development is fun, and we all deserve it!

By the way, forgot to mention that I am also passionate about Piano as much as I do in software. I will be posting about it from time to to time. SE posts will be made in English for my good friends to read without resorting to a Rosetta stone. Piano stuff will mostly be in Thai (ภาษาไทย) mainly because of the type of things I play.

SE & Me

A few bullets point about what I did in software engineering (and what software engineering did to me).

• Since my Masters Degree is not a research oriented one, I only write two major papers when I was studying.
  • Privacy Risk Assessment Case Studies in Support of SQUARE.  I was writing this with Prashanth as a research assistance under supervision of Dr. Nancy Mead of the SEI. We were looking at different risk assessments specific to privacy concerns that might be able to support the Security Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE) process.
  • Measuring Requirements Engineering Success. This is actually my term paper on one of the subject I study: Managing Software Development. I was looking at different techniques used to measure effectiveness of requirements engineering and discussed how to roll out a measurement program based on that.
• I was working in a team in which SCRUM process is gradually introduced for about a year.
• In my practicum project works I used OpenUP as an overarching (Agile?) process.
• Besides OpenUP, I also experiment with these neat stuff: Quality Attributes Workshop (Thank you – Felix Bachmann), Contextual Design, Use Cases, TDD, Continuous Integration, Risk Management, Architecture Experiments (part of ACDM), Architecture Design based on Quality Attributes, Formal Inspection.
• I fall in love with both Agile and TSP at the same time (okay – a little more love toward Agile because it’s public knowledge). I don’t think the world is complete if we burn either one of them.
• CMMi is not the root of all evil, it’s how people use them.
• Although I usually screams Agile!, I am a strong supporter of The Introductory Team Software Process (TSPi) as a tool for software engineering education for College students.
• Agile Practices I adore: Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration User Story, Planning Poker, Backlog, Burndown Chart, Embrace Changes
• Agile Practices I challenge: Refactoring, Pair Programming, Metaphor(XP)
• SE Practices I adore: Peer Review, Effective Meeting, Condition-Consequences Risk Management, Misuse cases, Architectural Design, Goal-Questions-Metrics.
• SE Practices of the future (IMHO): Static Analysis, Architecture Discovery