My work life

I work at IBM in the role of a Program Director / Principal Product Manager for software tools used by engineers and developers to create the amazingly complex products, systems and systems-of-systems our societies rely on, including planes, trains, automobiles, space vehicles, military systems, advanced medical devices and diagnostic tools, and IT systems that enable smooth operation of our financial sector and government services.

Selected papers and presentations

The following papers and presentations were written as part of my work, and IBM or my co-author’s organization holds the copyright. I am thankful for the opportunities I have had to work with such high-caliber collaborators on many of them.

Applying AI to Engineering: A perspective inspired by systems thinking by Daniel Moul. Presented at REConf the requirements engineering conference, Munich, Germany. April 2024.

Achieving agility and maximizing reuse of the Micro Vapor Cycle System Product Line with IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management by Christine Shea and Daniel Moul. Presented at the INCOSE International Symposium 2023. July 2023.

Introducing IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management V7 by Daniel Moul. Public webcast hosted by Persistent Systems Ltd. March 2020. Watch the replay.

• IBM Engineering (aka IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management) is the new name for the IBM Continuous Engineering Solution. With the new name comes a UI face lift and a strategic focus on insightful engineering at enterprise scale.

Reyond Requirements Engineering: Solving the really hard problems in engineering and development by Daniel Moul. REConf 2019 conference. March 2019.

• Requirements are only meaningful if they are defined and used within a development process – ideally one that guides teams to maximum impact and maximum efficiency. This statement has many implications for your development process and the many tools your developers and engineers use as they bring your development process to life. A foundational enabler is the ability to create a shared development context for your teams and evolving it in a controlled way: across multiple tools from multiple vendors, maintaining dependencies among the data in these tools, and with effective change management. This session will briefly survey ways this is typically addressed today with the various compromises that are inherent in these approaches, then explain the concepts and promise of “global configurations” in your engineering tool chain as enabled by OASIS OSLC Configuration Management and implemented by the IBM Continuous Engineering solution for software and systems engineering.

Global configuration management: Vision, progress, possible directions by Daniel Moul and Kathryn Fryer. Continuous Engineering Europe conference. May 2018.

• Global configuration management promises a new level of simplicity and automation for teams developing complex systems who need to achieve higher levels of change control, reuse, with traceability across the development lifecycle, and at scale. Requirements, designs, tests, files and potentially other tools and their artifacts can participate in federated development streams and baselines. This session will (1) review the motivations for this OASIS OSLC initiative; (2) implementation progress in IBM tools, partner tools and client adoptions; and (3) offer some thoughts about future directions.

What? You can do that now? A survey of what’s new in the IBM Continuous Engineering Solution by Daniel Moul. Continuous Engineering Europe conference. May 2018.

• Fasten your seat belts! In this single session you can get caught up on the significant new capabilities in the IBM solution delivered over the last year and in interim milestones since then (and planned for general availability this summer). We will look at what’s new for requirements management, systems engineering, agile/lean development, quality management, software development, reporting, and the digital twin.

Developing enterprise-level IoT Solutions using Continuous Engineering tools and practices by Daniel Moul and Fariz Saracevic. IBM IoT conference. November 2017.

• Innovation in connected IoT systems can be accelerated by exploiting the development-operations feedback loop. An example with storyboards illustrates the concepts introduced in this presentation.

How to ensure dependability of smart, connected products by Daniel Moul. IBM public webcast. October 2016.

• How much dependability do you need–and which kinds? There is a cost to create dependable systems–and a cost of failure when you don’t. Some some real-world IoT failures are highlighted, and some trade-offs are discussed.

Requirements reuse and more–from first principles by Daniel Moul. InterConnect 2016 conference. February 2016.

• Starting with the concepts of linked data and Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC), this session surveys: 1) version and configuration management capabilities in the IBM IoT Continuous Engineering solution for requirements, tests, designs and implementations based on IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM); and 2) implementation patterns, including product line engineering (PLE); and 3) efficiencies teams can gain by adopting the IBM IoT Continuous Engineering solution when building smart and connected systems.

Tame complexity with product line engineering: Why strategic reuse is the key to mastering complexity in product development–and how you can use it for simplified, more accurate engineering by Steve Shoaf, Daniel Moul, and Barclay Brown. IBM public whitepaper. July 2015.

Product Line Engineering: using strategic reuse to tame IoT product development complexity by Daniel Moul. Public IBM webcast. 2015.

• In story form, this session looks at some of the challenges development teams face when engineering for the Internet of Things as a successful product turns into a set of related products.

Wow! Configuration management across teams and tools with IBM Rational Jazz by Daniel Moul and Nick Crossley. InterConnect 2015 conference. February 2015.

• Today’s complex products and systems are mix of software, electronics, and hardware – with software taking an increasing role. The design and development of these complex systems requires many kinds of artifacts. Engineers in specialist disciplines produce these artifacts. Engineers practicing the various engineering disciplines use various tools. They come from multiple vendors. But these artifacts typically are not under Configuration Management, or if they are, it’s done with half-measures that incur trade-offs. These challenges exist for software-only systems, yet their magnitude is much greater for products with physical, electrical and software aspects. Tools build on open, flexible services and Internet architecture with cross-tool configuration management address many of the half-measures engineering teams implement today. Cross-tool, cross-domain uses cases are presented in diagrams, and global configuration management is introduced.

The End of Cloning: Strategic Reuse and Product Line Engineering With the IBM Rational Platform by Daniel Moul and Barclay Brown. Innovate 2014 conference. June 2014.

• In the beginning we made things all alike, or we made custom things for individual customers. Not customers demand increasingly specialized and customized products, and costs are going through the roof. Product Line Engineering practices implemented using an open, federated platform for PLE can address this challenge. We recommend the IBM solution for continuous engineering.

Increasing productivity with requirements reuse and variant management with DOORS Next Generation by Eran Gery, Daniel Moul, and Brian Steele. Innovate2014 conference. June 2014.

• There is a trend toward mass customization and shorter product lifecycles, with more embedded software, and more complex connected products. At the same time it’s necessary to adhere to increasing safety standards, compliance and regulations.

Visual Definition in the Requirements Lifecycle: A Conceptual Framework by Daniel Moul. Innovate2012 conference. June 2012. Original version co-authored with Andy Berner and presented at an IBM Academy of Technology conference.

• This session provides a framework for evaluating the best uses of text and various visual notations in the requirements process. Presenters highlight this in reference to IBM Rational Requirements Composer, application simulation tools such as iRise, and UML/SysML modeling.

Keeping Business Dreams From Becomming Software Delivery Nightmares by Matt Holitza and Daniel Moul. IBM public webcast. 2010.

• IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management tools–coupled with good development practices–can help you achieve your business dreams and avoid IT delivery nightmares.

Sailing in cross currents: setting your course amidst the many current approaches to requirements by Daniel Moul and Keith Collyer. Innovate 2010 conference. June 2010.

• Web development? Manufactured products? Packaged applications? SOA? Agile? System requirements specifications? Use cases? User stories? Faced with the many competing types of projects and approaches to creating and managing requirements, how can you determine which are right for your organization? This session surveys major approaches, provides a framework to help you assess them, and offers some keys to successful implementation based on years of IBM Rational and Telelogic experience.

Drinking our own champagne: Rational Requirements Composer by Robin Bater and Daniel Moul. Innovate 2010 conference. June 2010.

• This presentation illustrates how the Rational Requirements Composer product team used the Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management Jazz products to specify, analyze, design and implement a key feature of RRC version 2, and how we are using that feature in developing the next version. It will focus on use of RRC itself and include a discussion of benefits to the team. Plus (we hope): (1) Give you a vision of how IBM Rational® Requirements Composer (RRC) can improve team performance and project outcomes; (2) Show you a “real” usage model that is improving the product; (3) Get you thinking about how you and your teams can benefit from RRC.

Adopting Requirements Definition Principles and practices with Rational Requirements Composer by Daniel Moul and Theresa Kratschmer. IBM public webinar. 2008.

• This session summarizes some principles for good requirements definition and management then explains how IBM Rational Requirements Composer helps teams to put them into practice.

Faster Appplication Change and Reuse with WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer by Daniel Moul and Paul Hensler. IBM Redpaper. 2008.

• Today’s enterprises could not exist without information technology. In fact, millions of lines of application code embody and enable business processes. These applications can be a source of competitive advantage as well as a brake on innovation. Existing systems have evolved over decades into massive sets of interrelated, complex combinations of computers, network equipment, middleware servers, storage systems, custom, and off-the-shelf software applications, as well as the data that these systems consume and generate. We examine the promise and the challenge of reuse and provide examples of using WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer to cut through the complexity of application changes, with a focus on mainframe applications.