Lord Bhattacharayya was scheduled to make yesterday’s Lord Austin Lecture on the theme of The Challenges of the 21st Century: Revolutions in Global Markets, Regulation and Customisation.

In his synopsis he notes three challenges facing manufacturers:

• The scale of global markets means that corporations will have to be more flexible while providing total quality in manufacturing and processes and increasing R&D spend. Time-to-market will become increasingly critical.
• Manufacturers will be faced with differing needs from different societies responding to global warming and safety in different ways.
• Increasing technological sophistication and consumer purchasing power will lead to increasing demands for more tailored products.

The lecture was at the 3rd IET Automotive Electronics Conference where I was yesterday to give a talk on Automotive Variant Management – more on this later…

We’re working with Nativebrand on sprucing up our image.

This is still at an early stage but one thing we found useful was preparation of a detailed brief in advance of approaching companies who might be able to help us.

To help us do this we used the Art Department’s handy guides to Briefing and Choosing a graphics designer. Might be of use to others in a similar position…

The Code Generation Network now has an associated set of fora (forums) at http://forums.codegeneration.net/index.php

If you’re interested in Code Generation, Model-Driven Software Development, Domain-Specific Languages, Software Factories, Generative Programming or any of a myriad of other related approaches then please sign-up today and join in the debate. (Well actually, at the time of this posting there’s not much debate yet but you get the idea…)

I’ve just finished reading the No Fluff, Just Stuff 2006 Anthology. Overall it’s a pretty good read and, being an anthology, I was able to skip a couple of chapters which I wasn’t interested in without losing the thread.

Chapter 15 by Glenn Vanderburg closes the book on a somewhat nostalgic note.

Glenn begins by harking back to the 80s when Bell Labs and others extolled the virtues of domain-specific languages – little languages that capture the essence of specific domains and so are highly-optimized for producing applications in those domains.

Glenn also detects a move towards dynamically-typed languages – observing that Ruby, Python and even Javascript (!) are becoming more popular as developers discover their increased productivity. Lisp and Smalltalk are also resurgent as a new generation discovers their benefits.

Glenn asks ‘Why now?’ – answering that Lisp and Smalltalk didn’t achieve widespread popularity first time around not because of any limitations they had but rather because of difficulty getting those languages to scale down to the feeble processors and memory limits available at the time. (Although it’s not impossible to produce small, fast Lisp applications with some work.)

Even though developer productivity was poor with languages such as C it was just efficient enough to squeeze out the more productive languages. Now that many applications have access to (comparatively) abundant resources the need to use statically-typed languages to squeeze the absolute maximum from your application isn’t so pressing and so more productive languages can be used.

 (If you want to read what Glenn says in full the chapter is available online here.)

A new ACCU Cambridge group is launching on 5th July at 19:00 with a talk from Pete Goodliffe entitled ‘Code Monkeys’. You don’t have to be an ACCU member to take part.

Synopsis:

Good programmers care about writing good code. Bad programmers… don’t.

In this talk Pete Goodliffe will investigate what it takes to be an excellent programmer. It’s a practical presentation that comes from the trenches (with a series of accompanying battle scars.) On the way, we’ll stroll through a gallery of social freaks and misfits and we’ll come to some surprise conclusions about what it means to write good software.

It’s interactive and fun, and it’ll make you a better programmer.

For more details see ACCU Cambridge.

Terence Parr has a new book out that looks to be of interest: “The Definitive ANTLR Reference: Building Domain-Specific Languages“.

The blurb I’ve seen notes that the book “shows how to use the brand new, latest version of ANTLR to create DSLs, convert text formats, and more.”

O’Reilly are sending me a copy of the book to review for the Code Generation Network (CGN) and I’m hoping to catch up with Terence for an interview. Terence’s StringTemplate template engine was covered in an earlier article on CGN.

The BCS Configuration Management group has what looks like an interesting talk coming up.

Configuration Management Horror Stories From An IT Auditor will give examples of horrors encountered during the speaker’s years as an IT auditor and some suggestions as to how they could possibly have been avoided.

The session takes place at 18.00 on 19th July at the BCS London Office, 5 Southampton Street. The meeting is free to members of the CM SG & the IRMA SG. You may apply to join IRMA or the CM SG at the meeting.

Our SPA Cambridge Agile Software Configuration Management session last week  – was run by Robert Cowham of Vaccaperna – head of the BCS Configuration Management group.

Here’s a flavour of the questions that came up:

• How to deal with problems configuring environments – develop/build/test/deploy
• How to deal with very frequent changes
• Why not just use Subversion?
  • Not so good for distributed development
  • Some commercial tools have some better features but they are coming under pressure from SVN. Scalability might be better in commercial tools. Integration may also be better with commercial tools.
• How to manage database configurations
• Do any of the tools handle merging (better than others)?
  • Still a problem area
• How to convince non-developers to use CM
  • Some developers still need convincing! Build business case around safety/recovery
• Who should manage CM – the whole team? a specialist?
  • In an agile setting should devolve responsibility to the team as a whole.

Some other points that came up:

• CM musn’t get in the way of an agile process – but the basic CM process must be followed.
• Continuous Integration is fairly straightforward to set up – but needs automated tests in place.
• Few new graduates know anything about CM or the value of CM. This can lead to resistance when they have to use CM.
• Frequent releases help process improvement.
• A balance needs to be achieved between broken builds and limiting check-ins.
• A good heuristic for process maturity is the ease with which an organisation produces its software release notes!

Robert’s slides will be available on the SPA Cambridge site at a future date.

June’s cvu – the magazine of the ACCU – has arrived and with it fairly full round-up of the 2007 ACCU Conference which is worth reading to get a flavour of the event.

A couple of comments stood out for me:

• Paul Greyner writes “The ACCU is still perceived as the Association of C/C++ users, and it’s certainly true that, although other languages are creeping in, the majority of the conference is still C++ focussed. I think we seriously need to change our perception…I don’t think C++ is dying yet, [my emphasis] but other languages are growing…”
• Anna-Jayne Metcalfe writes “One thing that came out very strongly [from Mary Poppendieck's keynote] was the contrast between large systems, smaller systems and software products – the latter are not prone to failure in the same way, and indeed my own experiences bears this out - none of the [product] projects I’ve worked on have failed, and all have been delivered.” – Unfortunately my own experience is different. My first job was in a product development company and that company failed after 30 months, although this was primarily down to problems outside the software development department in my view.

The article also includes edited versions of my blog posts from the conference:

Chaos aids learning – coaching software development teams - Anna-Jayne also writes about this session.

Simplicity in Software

Mobile convergence – it’s nice because there’s so much of it! - Nicola Mussatti also comments on this session.

Generative Programming in the large - applied meta-programming

I’m afraid that cvu is only available to ACCU members, but membership is really cheap and the journals are good quality publications. A must if you’re into C/C++/Java etc.

As I’ve noted previously the University of Oxford runs a specialist course on Software Product Lines as part of its post-graduate Software Engineering programme.

Roberto Lopez-Herrejon was kind enough to invite me to give a talk about pure::variants to the class last week and I was very happy to oblige.

It was quite a different experience for me speaking in front of an audience that is drawn from industry but has an academic setting.

The questions I got reflected the nature of this audience:

• Does the Feature modeller handle cardinality? – yes e.g. selecting n from m in an OR relationship, feature attributes may also take on a value from a range of values
• What’s the difference between a relation and a restriction? -  Semantically they are not that different. Relations like conflicts /requires etc. can also be expressed with restrictions / constraints. However, relations have a limited expressive power, therefore when there are problems they are much easier to analyze. Also, due to the way pure::variants handles target selection for relations mistakes are much less likely. Relations can also have other (not configuration related) semantics.
• Does pure::variants validate Feature Models (To ensure at least variant can be produced?) – The extended autoresolver knows how to check this property.
• Why use PROLOG as the rules language and constraint checker? – available , high-performance tools, good at this type of problem, syntax not too difficult (rule definitions)

After the talk I was thanked and given a University of Oxford T-shirt. Not sure I can wear this around town (Cambridge) though.

Roberto has run the course a couple of times now and plans to do so again in the future. Drop him a line if you’d like to participate – although you probably have to register for the MSc.. I hope to speak there again – if invited – and we should be able to run a pure::variants tutorial there next time as opposed to just a talk/demo.