I met up with Peter Bell a couple of weeks ago for a chat about his work at SystemsForge.

Peter has come up with a neat scheme whereby his company can produce a customized web site infrastructure for a client using a combination of Software Product Line and Domain-Specific Language techniques. I’ve heard his approach described as “the first ever ColdFusion software factory” and I’m hoping that Peter will be able to tell us more in his session at Code Generation 2007.

You can see Peter’s take on the meeting here.

SPA Cambridge’s next meeting will be held on February 21st from 19:00 (light buffet) 19:30 (talk). “Algorithmic Music” will be led by David Harvey of Sibelius.

Synopsis

Since the days of Pythagoras, musicians and music theorists have explored the relationships between music, pattern, process and mathematics. Mostly this thinking informs models of musical structure and content: sometimes this crosses over into tools or processes for creating music. This talk will take a look at the development of algorithmic composition, from Fux’s codification of counterpoint and Mozart’s famous musical dice game, through to the possibilities opened up by computers and programs such as KOAN, Max and David Cope’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence - and pose some interesting questions along the way about what sort of musical meaning results fom these processes. Needless to say, there’ll be plenty to listen to…

Visit the Algorithmic Music page for more information and to preregister.

It seems like eons ago since I last gave a Code Generation 2007 planning update and that is reflected in the amount of news below:

We’re currently working on the programme for the event and a first draft has been circulated for comment. I’m hoping that the final draft will be available by the end of next week but that is dependent upon few revisions being proposed for the first draft.

The Call for Session Proposals closed on January 12th, and I received several proposals that day (and a couple after the deadline). I’ve been pretty pleased with the overall quality and range of coverage of the proposals so I hope that a high-quality programme, of interest to potential participants will emerge.

I’m very pleased to note that Krzysztof Czarnecki, of the University of Waterloo, author of the key book “Generative Programming”, has confirmed as our second keynote speaker, and will give a talk themed around Generative Programming and Model-Based Development.

I’m also pleased to note the support of some additional event sponsors: Netfective, ARTiSAN Software, pure-systems, Xactium & NT/e have all come on board and I’m very pleased to welcome them. There’s more information on these companies at the CG2007 sponsors page.

One final snippet of news - the event web site has undergone some improvements to make it more usable. Thanks to Andy Moorley of Truedata for some sterling work there.

In terms of what happens next:

1. Finalizing and publishing the programme are our top priorities.
2. Booking will open when the programme has been published - although I have received a number of enquiries about participating already.
3. Further content will be added to the web site to cover things like finding accomodation nearby, our social events - including the conference dinner, Birds-of-a-Feather session suggestions etc.

If you’re planning to come along, why not get in touch and let us know what other information you need to be able to make a final decision.

The Embedded Systems Show 2007 will take place from October 17th-18th 2007 at the NEC, Birmingham.

Given the success of 2006’s show we’ve decide to exhibit there again and have now made our stand booking (note to potential exhibitors - there is a 10% discount for stand bookings made before February 28th). The exhibition hall has a different layout this year so it will be interesting to see who we eventually end up next to.

For the historically-minded here are links to our (brief) reports from last year’s show:

ESS 2006 - one day down, one to go, ESS 2006 Day Two

This post was prompted by seeing that Cambridge Usability Group’s first event of 2007 (on February 5th) is titled Selling Usability to Business.

Usability is an important quality in any product but is often neglected in software products. I personally became aware of usability back in 1987 when working as part of a team developing a computer-based training authoring tool - as far as I can remember it never came up in my CS degree course…

I started reading up on usability including authors such as Ben Schneiderman and Donald Norman. I even joined ACM SIGCHI, the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, and started to find out more about designing for usability and measuring usability.

Even when I started working more under-the-bonnet, and moved more into software development management, usability was still a factor, although a less direct factor than when I worked on application GUIs. For example, responsiveness to user requests, an important usability consideration, can have a big effect on your application’s back-end architecture.

In my present role usability has become more important again. At present this is primarily related to our web presence at Software Acumen, the Code Generation Network and here at The Variation Point. Long-term visitors to our Software Acumen site will have noticed a number of changes over the years and many of these have been driven by attempts to make the site easier to use. We recognize that we have some way to go with this but this is an area we’ll be devoting more time to later this year. We also have a long-term project to change the underlying platform for the Code Generation Network to make it easier to use and administer (we are also users of this site, and so usability as perceived by us is also important).

To help us make the right changes we use the principles from Jakob Nielsen’s excellent books “Designing Web Usability” and “Prioritizing Web Usability”. We also keep abreast of the latest research results and thoughts from Jakob through subscribing to his fortnightly Alertbox Newsletter. Well worth signing up to if you have any influence on your web site’s usability.

We also take into account feedback we get from site visitors. So, if you have any comments or suggestions please get in touch by emailing me at mark@software-acumen.com.

SPA Cambridge’s next meeting will be held on January 17th from 19:00. “Use Cases - for and against” will be led by Richard Mitchell of Inferdata.

Synopsis

Ask many people how they capture requirements for IT systems (particularly business information systems) and they will reply “with use cases”.

The case for use cases is that they work, and they can be shared between business and IT people.

The case against use cases is that they work only when everyone already knows the rules (or has an alternative path for discovering them). If you concentrate on capturing the rules, you can get to use cases as a design step.

In this talk, Richard will work through an example of capturing rules. From these rules, we’ll be able to derive a use case as a design for the user interaction.

Visit the Use Cases - for and against page for more information and to preregister.