The Motor Industry Software Reliability Association (MISRA) has announced a public review of its autocode guidelines. These guidelines have been produced to “encourage good modelling practices and avoid poorly-defined features of the modelling language” in control system modelling packages.

The guidelines are divided into three areas:

• MISRA SLSF – guidelines for users of Simulink and Stateflow.
• MISRA TL – guidelines for users of Targetlink.
• MISRA ACG – guidelines for compliance with MISRA C in automatically-generated code.

The review is open until 31st March 2007. In order to participate you have to complete and send off a form at http://www.misra.org.uk/misra_ac_eoi.pdf. (NB The form gives a deadline of 28th February but this deadline has changed.)

Unfortunately I was unable to secure a speaker from MISRA to talk about the guidelines at Code Generation 2007. Maybe next year…

The BCS Configuration Management Group’s 2007 conference will take place in Oxford from 15th – 16th May 2007. To quote the organisers, “The conference will bring together managers and practitioners working in Change, Configuration and Release management. Presentations by practitioners and world leaders in the field will cover a wide variety of topics”.

The event is a great opportunity to find out about configuration management best practice as it applies is some of the most challenging development organisations, and to find out about the latest tool offerings – all of the leading life cycle vendors are expected to have a representation.

We exhibited at last year’s tools fair and have decided to raise our profile this year by becoming Silver sponsors of the event. We’ll be there to show off pure::variants, the software variant management toolset that we distribute in the UK and Ireland.

A few months ago I noted that Apple had teamed up with Ford, GM and Mazda to allow iPods to connect to car stereos.

I now see that Ford and Microsoft are collaborating to enable voice-activated music and telephone calls for car drivers. The ‘Sync’ system will be available as an option in some models from 2008 and all models from 2009. This follows earlier work between Microsoft and Honda and Acura. 

In-car electronics is a key battleground between the different motor manufacturers and as the struggle for market-share continues we’re likely to see more announcements in this area. Read more at http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12760_7-9672096-5.html

Things have settled down a little on organising Code Generation 2007 this week allowing me to focus on tying up some loose ends and looking forward to what remains to be done before the event. 

The previous week saw the event programme go live, followed shortly by booking opening. We’ve had a lot of positive feedback on the programme – which is rather nice to hear – and the first bookings have started to come in, which is even nicer

We’ve decided to run an early-bird booking period until Friday 16th March to encourage people to book early (duh!) . Early-bird bookers get a £100 discount – we get less stress by being able to predict more accurately how many people will come to the event.

Members of OMG, The IET and IASA and CBDI Forum Gold and Silver members all get a 10% discount.  These organisations have all been very supportive of the event.

This week has seen the focus shift to pinning down some things like where and when we’ll have the conference dinner, what form the other social activities will take and what we need to do to finalize arrangements on the day.

On Wednesday I met up with Andy Moorley of Truedata who are our excellent event administrators. Andy is an old hand at such things having been involved in the organisation of the SPA conference series for several years and has been a guiding light on the admin side for CG2007. If you’re thinking of organising a software-related event (and I advise you to think carefully about what you’re getting into) then you could do worse than get in touch with Truedata to handle the administration side.

An article in last month’s Infoworld strikes a somewhat negative note on Microsoft’s Software Factories initiative. Despite hitting 100,000 downloads since release 6 months ago Greg DeMichillie, lead analyst for software development tools at analysts Directions on Microsoft, is sceptical.

DeMichillie compares Software Factories to technologies such as DLLs and OOP and notes that those technologies only offer incremental improvement. He doesn’t see Software Factories as offering the step change that the industry needs.

However, DeMichillie seems to have failed to pick up on one of the key differences between Software Factories and earlier reuse-based approaches. Software Factories, and other Software Product Line approaches, derive their benefits from a strategic approach to reuse based on economies of scope.

What this means is that applications derived from a Software Factory are all sufficiently similar to allow reusable components to be developed once and incorporated into many applications. This economy of scope means that the cost to develop and reuse these components is lower than if the applications were unrelated.

DeMichillie also seems to be unaware of case studies from the community that show order of magnitude improvements in key measures such as productivity, quality and time-to-market when organisations transition to a Software Product Line approach.

Whether Microsoft’s Software Factories initiative will be successful or not is another matter. In pure::variants we have our own approach to building and managing Software Product Lines which takes a slightly different direction from Software Factories – although in fact pure::variants can complement Software Factories and other DSL toolsets such as Metacase’s Metaedit+.

So, the paper proposal I have with Danilo Beuche of pure-systems, has been accepted for the 3rd BCS CMSG Conference.

The controversially named ‘Configuration Management: an anti-pattern for implementing variability?’ will shine a light on the murky area of software variant management – managing the process of developing multiple similar-but-different software systems aka Software Product Lines.

We’re planning to argue that most organizations fail to manage their variants efficiently due to a heavy reliance solely on their Configuration Management system and that adopting a more comprehensive variant management approach can yield better results.

We’ll back this up by discussing a couple of case studies of organisations who rely heavily on their CM system for variant management and one who has introduced systematic variant management to complement their CM system.  We’ll conclude by explaining the benefits of this complementary approach.

There is a sense of Daniel entering the Lion’s Den here (no pun intended Danilo) but hopefully the audience of Configuration Management veterans will treat us kindly despite this potential heresy.

The conference takes place in Oxford from May 15th-16th.

After a significant increase in comment spam here at the Variation Point in recent days we decided to take action. WordPress itself offers a number of options for doing this and these are outlined in an article on the WordPress Codex Combatting Comment Spam. Our anti-spam approach already used most of these capabilities.

We were also already using the Akismet spam filter and this has been 100% effective in identifying comment spam with no false positives. However we have been spending an increasing amount of time checking our Akismet results for false positives so have now decided to add the Bad Behavior plug-in to try and reduce this effort.

Bad Behavior aims to prevent spambots accessing the site by analyzing their behaviour and checking their profile against known spambot behaviors. Many other WordPress bloggers seem to have taken this approach and been very successful in first reducing the number of automated spam posts (using Bad Behavior) and filtering out those that are missed (using Akismet). One advantage of adding Bad Behavior should be a drop in bandwidth usage by spambots – an important consideration for us as some months we have exceeded our total bandwidth allowance.

For an even more rigourous approach some sites have also been using Spam Karma in their anti-spammer arsenal. The three plug-ins are reported to work well together.

Numerous captcha plug-ins are also available for WordPress. You’ve probably seen these already – they add the capability to require the site visitor to enter some characters, or answer a maths question that has been displayed on the web page before a comment can be submitted. We will consider adding one of these plug-ins depending on how well the Bad Behaviour / Akismet combination works out.

If you do decide to add a captcha plug-in then think about how legible the generated text is – you need a balance between making it hard for spambots that are equipped with character reading capability – yes there are some – and making it hard for people who want to make genuine comments.

You should also think about accessibility issues e.g. by providing an alternate audio capability that reads out the letters for blind or visually-impaired vistors. The wikipedia article on captchas is as good a place to start as any to find out more.

The programme for Code Generation 2007 is now online at http://www.codegeneration.net/cg2007/programme.php

A few session details and speaker biographies still have to be completed but the page gives a good overview of the conference content.

Booking will open in a day or two.

Update 14th February 2007

Booking is now open.

This year’s INCOSE Spring Conference 2007 has the theme of “The Future of Systems Engineering”. The conference will look at questions such as:

• What is the value of Systems Engineering to my enterprise or domain, and how can it help to tackle the future challenges we face?
• What does it mean to be a Systems Engineer or to do Systems Engineering, and how does this relate to recruitment, education and career progression?
• What best practice currently exists or is being researched, to help us solve today’s Systems Engineering challenges?

The programme is under development – although the first day’s tutorial sessions have all been planned. These cover topics such as Management and Risk, Requirements and Acceptance and  Architecture and Architecture Frameworks.

We’ve taken a stand at the event and will be showing pure::variants. We think there’s good potential for us at this event because of the focus on traceability across the whole life cycle taken by systems engineers and pure::variants improves traceability across the life cycle for organisations developing system variants.

The event will run from 16-18^th April 2007 at the Swindon Marriott, Swindon, England. More details at the INCOSE Spring Conference 2007 web site.