Siemens Corporate Development Center Asia Australia (CT DC AA) develops and maintains software applications for the Industry, Energy, Healthcare, and Infrastructure & Cities sectors of Siemens. The critical nature of these applications necessitates a high level of software design quality. A survey of software architects indicated a low level of satisfaction with existing design assessment practices in CT DC AA and highlighted several shortcomings of existing practices. To address this, we have developed a design assessment method called MIDAS (Method for Intensive Design ASsessments). MIDAS is an expert-based method wherein manual assessment of design quality by experts is directed by the systematic application of design analysis tools through the use of a three view-model consisting of design principles, project-specific constraints, and an “ility”-based quality model. In this paper, we describe the motivation for MIDAS, its design, and its application to three projects in CT DC AA. We believe that the insights from our MIDAS experience not only provide useful pointers to other organizations and practitioners looking to assess and improve software design quality but also suggest research questions for the software engineering community to explore.

Siemens Corporate Development Center India (CT DC IN) develops software applications for the industry, energy, health-care, and infrastructure & cities sectors of Siemens. These applications are typically critical in nature and require software practitioners who have considerable competency in the area of software engineering. To enhance the competency of engineers, CT DC IN has introduced an internal curriculum titled “FOundation CUrriculum for Software engineers” (FOCUS) which is an adapted version of IEEE's SWEBOK curriculum. The FOCUS program has been used to train more than 500 engineers in the last three years. In this experience report, we describe the motivation for FOCUS, how it was structured to address the specific needs of CT DC IN, and how the FOCUS program was rolled out within the organization. We also provide results obtained from a survey of the FOCUS participants, their managers, and FOCUS trainers that was conducted to throw light on the effectiveness of the program. We believe the insights from the survey results provide useful pointers to other organizations and academic institutions that are planning to adopt a SWEBOK-based curriculum.