Ferien-Akademie 2003

Software Theater

Kurs 12

The course is organized into several sessions, each consisting of 90-minute presentations given by three individual students followed by intensive discussions about the topics presented. One of the course's highlights will be a rapid design session. We will try to build storyboards and layout films within very limited time and gain a lot of fun and useful insights by this hands-on experience.

Day 1: What is Software Theater/Software Cinema?

The course starts with a description of the software engineering background in which Software Theater is the new methodology we introduce. We will talk about scenarios for making the most out of this methodology and create a guideline for future project managers on how and when to use it. This session lays the ground for the ones to follow, we will get an overview of the existing and needed enablers to make the vision of Software Theater come true.

The afternoon is going to revolve around all ideas we can come up with for the Scenario of our film project: Ubiquitous Computing for Global Software Engineering projects. Dan starts off with an introduction on how to do brainstorming and we use this newly acquired skill to do a rapid prototype of our film: A storyboard.

Day 2: The Movies

This day is devoted to the art of movie making. We will discuss film scripts, dramaturgy, camera work, directing and editing. As we intend to use the language of the movies for specifying a complex system, we need to learn to speak this language. The discussion focuses on which parts are easy matches from storyboard to source code, and we will identify which aspects of a system are more challenging.

This afternoon will begin with creating a shopping list for the local hardware store. All ideas we came up with will require some props, and some real pieces of software. Everything which we cannot build right then and there, we will have to fake and use visual effects for. We will have a hands-on prop creation session, followed by a collaborative script writing session, using a distributed editor.

Day 3: Applications

This day is reserved for discussing the wealth of potential applications of this design philosophy. As our film project is about ubiquitous support for project management, this will be one central discussion point. But there are several other ideas we want to discuss: Home healthcare, mobile maintenance scenarios, or collaborative distributed surgery planning.

The afternoon will consist of problem solving in our scenario. This is the time when we want to trim down all the clever and wild ideas to something that we can acutally film during the second week. For this, the dialogue and prop interactions will have to be dry-run, tested and scripted. When the script is baselined, we can reorder it by locations and analyze the feasability of our shooting list.

Day 4: Tools

A day reserved for learning the tools of the trade. We will have a guest speaker, who is an expert in non-linear video editing, and will introduce us to the intricacies of Final Cut Pro 4. As our "deployment hardware" is going to be off-the-self DVD players, we will also have a close look at DVD Studio Pro and all the other helper tools that go along with DVD production.

After playing around with so many examples of good software, we will be making our own contribution and try to build those systems that we intend to show in the movie. Depending on our abilities, this afternoon might be extended to go on until nightfall... But in the end, we need to have the first integration test of our cinema software.

Day 5: Technologies

On this day, we will discuss the technology enablers for some of the systems we discussed on day 3. We will take an in-depth look at zero configuration networking (Apple's Rendezvous), Bluetooth, and smart environments for ubiquitous computing. Also, technology evaluation and experience reports will be shared among the participants.

The afternoon will be taken up by debugging: On the one hand the software that's supposed to run in the film, and on the other hand the shooting plan, script, location and cast selection. At the end, we will have a clearer picture on how we are going to film, edit, and produce the Ubiquitous Computing for Global Software Engineering DVD.