We’re pretty sceptical here about promoting ourselves through print adverts, primarily because I think that the people we’re promoting our products and services to expect to find everything they need to know prior to evaluating a product or service through the web. As a result we’ve tended to spend more effort on building and promoting our websites (Software Acumen, The Code Generation Network and this blog).

However, for the first time we’re experimenting with running a print advertisement in September’s ESE magazine. This is aimed at raising our profile, and the profile of the pure::variants software variant management tool that we distribute, and at making people aware of our stand at October’s ESS 2006.

ESE magazine’s designers have been very understanding of our newbie status and we’ve eventually agreed on the advert shown below.

You can click on the ad image for a larger version. Do let us know what you think of the ad, and whether you think print is dead as an advertising medium for software development products and services.  (and also – whether physical exhibitions are dead as a promotion channel for software development products and services?)            Thanks.

Just a quick note that the 2007 Software Product Lines Conference (SPLC 2007) will take place from September 10th – 14th 2007 at Kyoto Research Park (KRP), Kyoto, Japan.

August’s AEI magazine has a nice article entitled Managing for software success that covers the main strategies for managing automotive embedded software projects.

The article notes that automotive software is not only growing in size exponentially but is also growing in complexity and in level of integration – with functions that were previously separate now inter-operating.

Jim Kolhoff, Director of Software Engineering at GM Powertrain, describes some of the management trends that have allowed them to maintain a high-level of quality while offering significantly more functionality.

• Building individual applications by configuring software that has been developed to be reusable in a large number of such applications (i.e. using a Software Product Line approach),
• Using Model-Based Development (e.g. to verify algorithms),
• Using Code Generation tools and techniques (e.g. to reduce errors when mapping from architecture to design to code),
• Adopting industry-wide standards (e.g. AUTOSAR)

Robert Gee, Director of Strategy for Systems and Software for Motorola’s Automotive Business, notes that, “a well-conceived architecture designed for maximum reuse and extensibility” is the approach that must be followed for success.

The article also outlines how GM use a similar Software Product Line strategy to reduce cost and risk.

SPLC 2006 kicks off in Baltimore on Monday and I’m busy wrapping things up before I travel to the conference.

I found out yesterday that 33 people have signed-up for my product line scoping tutorial – The Scoping Game. This is great news and thanks should go to the SEI staff promoting the session so effectively. However, it has given me some last-minute work as I had anticipated around 16-20 participants would come, and the numbers I had been given up until yesterday suggested that was about right. Lets just say that our printer and (borrowed) laminator will both be running hot tonight

Anyway, I’ll report back here next week on the outcome.

P.S. You can still register for the conference on the day but we’ve now closed registrations for my tutorial session.

Jason Gorman has saved me a lot of time by writing an excellent summary of last Friday’s miniSPA including descriptions of the sessions I didn’t take part in - namely Mike Taulty’s C# session and the post-miniSPA pub trip. I’ve posted some notes on miniSPA’s Distributed Workforces session for those who’d like more detail on that particular session.

Jason has also included some nice pictures of the event that shows that yes, we were in fact working (for most of) that day. However, I would like to note that I would never stoop to working on Footballer’s Wives – unless the software industry gets really bad.

Last Friday’s miniSPA included a session on Distributed Workforces. This used the goldfish bowl format with a facilitator (Bernard Horan) and five press-ganged participants (David Harvey, Eoin Woods, Andy Moorley, Chris Cooper-Bland and Rob Machin) starting the discussion. A spare chair was available and this was occupied by various other participants throughout the session. My legible notes included:

• Most of the participants had learned their craft by working closely with more experienced people around them. What are the implications of a distributed workforce for new starters?
• Can a distributed workforce create the same sort of beneficial social environment as is found in a non-distributed arrangement? Can team members bond in the same way?
• Can we learn anything from other distributed workforces? e.g. community nursing, sales forces, open-source. Since software is a design activity should we look at other design activities for inspiration – no one could think of an example of distributed design.
• What are the prerequisites for distributing your workforce?
• How much experience should the team have? Does a distributed workforce have to consist of experts?
• Should they know each other
• Communication is key – but technology isn’t sufficient, get people to meet initially and regularly. Outsourcers take note.
• Your organisation shouldn’t have the attitude that people have to be at their desk in the office to be working
• Increasing cost of travel, and reluctance to travel, combined with decreasing communication costs will lead to more workforce distribution.
• Co-locating your team will always be more productive.
• Management of distributed workforces is hard.

 Bernard will place a sound recording of the session on the SPA Wiki in due course.

I was at miniSPA last Friday and David Harvey kicked us off with a quick warm-up exercise to get us into the mood. Each group was asked to come up with a maximum of ten words to complete the following:

“Hey, I hear you’re an IT manager and you’re consistenly failing to deliver software on time and within budget. The best advice I can give you is …”

Various ideas were floated by the various groups including the frivoulous – ask for a pay rise, hire a consultant and go to SPA2007 and after each group had chosen one piece of advice a vote was taken and the winner was (along the lines of)

Work out what went wrong

Learn from your mistakes

Which I’m happy to suggest came from the group I was in.

I’ll hopefully get a chance to post some more on miniSPA before I head off to SPLC 2006, in the meantime let us know what your advice would have been.

Apple is to team up with Ford, GM and Mazda to allow iPods to connect to car stereos. This is currently possibly through adapters or radio connections but will be supported by a direct connection in many future vehicle models.

Read the news release at http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/aug/03ipod.html

It would be technically-harder to accomplish but wouldn’t it be more consumer-friendly if the vehicles offered a generic connection for portable devices rather than an iPod-specific connection?

The 10th International Software Product Lines Conference (SPLC 2006) is now less than three weeks away and I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the tutorial I’m running at the conference on Tuesday 22nd August – The Scoping Game. The slides went off to be printed last week, flights and hotels are in place so, barring last minute hitches, everything is now in place for the trip.

This has given me time to think about what other sessions I might attend…

I have no definite plans for Day 1 yet but the tutorials on Product Line Requirements Engineering and Creating Resuable Test assets in a Product Line should be useful. The workshop on Agile Product Line Engineering could also be worthwhile.

Day 2 begins with my tutorial session and I’ll probably take the afternoon off, although I am tempted by Don Batory’s session on Feature Modularity in Product Lines.

Keynotes from Gregor Kiczales and Carliss Baldwin begin Days 3 and 4 of the conference. I’m hoping that Gregor’s session will tie into some of the Early Aspects work I talked about at SPA 2006. Carliss’ talk focusses on Product Line economics – an essential issue underpinning the whole business case for Product Lines – which relates to the material in my Scoping session.

In terms of other sessions I find that I get the most value from Panel sessions and Experience Reports. It’s generally in these types of sessions that concrete advice on Software Product Line adoption that I can use with clients emerges. This isn’t to knock any of the research that’ll be reported in other sessions – it’s more a matter of using my time to best effect as I can usually read up on the research reports in the conference proceeedings and follow-up with the researcher later if necessary.

One disappointment this year is that I have to miss the (usually entertaining) Hall of Fame session as I have to travel to the West Coast in the afternoon of Day 4 for work.

If you haven’t registered yet there are places available (Early bird registration closes on 9th August though) so I hope to see some of you there. Come and say hello.

The July / August 2006 issue of Embedded Systems Engineering magazine has a lot of coverage on Modelling and Code Generation for Embedded Systems. In the editor’s words “Code Generation may not produce the quality of code that can be written by the very best programmer, but the best tools produce competent code that does the job, and they produce it quickly.” Six articles, primarily written by vendor representatives, look at different aspects of the topic:

“SysML hits the home straight” gives a short overview of the SysML modelling language – an extended subset of UML that includes special support for requirements traceability and Blocks – essentially a general purpose way of modelling system hierarchies. Worth a read if you just want a flavour of what SysML is and if you’re convinced that Visual modelling languages are the way to go.

“Modelling in Eclipse” is promisingly titled and begins with a brief description of the Eclipse development framework but the focus of the article is on Executable and Translatable UML (xtUML) a subset of UML with a defined execution semantics, that can be translated into an implemetation, rather than a general survey of the various modelling options available for Eclipse.

“Generating full code with DSM” makes a good argument for Domain-Specific Modelling languages to support code generation. The idea behind domain-specific languages is to allow you, the developer, to control what code gets generated when and to do so by allowing you to create a little (or big in some cases) language that is best suited to capturing your design intent. This approach should give you more confidence in the generated code than that generated using a black-box generator approach.

“Developing platform-independent embedded applications” makes a case for Platform Independent Modelling as the basis for Code Generation. This is the approach advocated by the OMG’s MDA initiative which I’ve talked about before.

“Systems & software modelling for safety critical environments” argues that modelling is attractive in settings where time-to-market is critical and development cycles are short but notes problems of determination and ambiguity in model-based approaches. SCADE, a domain-specific language with roots in the aeronautics industry, is introduced as a tool which has been built with these problems in mind.

The final article, “In-depth: System modelling and verification“, looks at these important topics and how they are being addressed by tool vendors.

All in all an interesting issue.