I see in a ComputerWorld UK article that consultancy firm IDC have released new research on the state of in-house software development.

IDC interviewed 139 corporate development firms for their ‘Improving Software Quality to Drive Business Agility’ survey with the main finding being that the majority of respondents noted that their in-house software has become more complex and harder to debug in the past couple of years. This software erosion means that code reviews are failing to find critical quality problems in almost half of the surveyed organisations.

The researcher’s advice to businesses: “… understand the long-term costs of poor quality software development and invest properly in the development cycle”. Unfortunately, the author notes that most businesses are very optimistic when it comes to estimating current and ongoing costs for fixing software quality problems.

Let me know if you have any counter-examples…

The slides for Jean-Marc Prieur’s (Microsoft) Code Generation 2008 session are now available here:

http://www.codegeneration.net/conference/slides.php.

Here’s the session synopsis:

One way code generation, as brought by the DSL Tools works fine. However, even this is not always feasible, there are some cases where users expect more: They want their model and their code to be synchronized as much as possible in order to make changes in model or code, whichever is the simplest. This session will present a few demos of DSLs for which the bi-directionality between code and model was added, and will sketch the underlying architecture of the incremental code generator which acts under the hood.

The Call for Participation for next year’s ACCU Conference is now available. Giovanni Asproni is in the hotseat again this time around as programme chair and has a tough job to beat the success of the 2008 event he chaired.

I’m planning to submit a couple of session proposals as I’ve really enjoyed the conference both times I’ve been and got a lot out of my ‘When Good Architecture Went Bad‘ workshop I ran this year…

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Call for Participation - ACCU 2009
April 22-25, 2009. Barcelo Oxford Hotel, Oxford, UK
http://www.accu.org/conference
Submission deadline: 20th of October 2008
Highlight: Special track on patterns, please read on
Email proposals to: Giovanni Asproni, conference@accu.org

We would like to invite you to present a session at this leading
software development conference.

Leading a session is a highly rewarding experience: the lively and highly engaged atmosphere of the  event means that, even as a speaker, you are likely to greatly enhance your understanding of the topic you are exploring.

We have a long tradition of high quality sessions covering many aspects of software development,  from programming languages (e.g., C, C++, Java, C#, Ruby, Groovy, Python, Erlang, Haskell, Lisp etc.), and technologies (libraries, frameworks, databases, etc.) to subjects about the wider  development environment such as development process, design, analysis, patterns, project mnnagement, and softer aspects such as team building, communication and leadership.

In particular, this year we are going to have a special track on patterns–design, organizational, etc., as long as they are related with software development. We are interested in experience reports, techniques, lessons learned, etc.

Sessions may be either tutorial-based, presentations of case studies, or take the form of interactive workshops. We are always open to novel formats, so please contact us with your idea. The standard  length of a session is 90 minutes, with some exceptions. In order to allow less experienced speakers to speak at the conference without the pressure of filling a full 90 minutes, we reserve a number of shorter 45 minute sessions.

This year we are going to have also some lightning talks, which are presentations of a maximum duration of 5 minutes (more information about this format at http://perl.plover.com/lt/osc2003/lightning-talks.html).

If you would like to run a session please let us know by emailing your proposals to conference@accu.org by the 20th of October 2008 at the latest.

Please include the following to support your proposal:

• Title (a working title if necessary)
• Type (tutorial, workshop, case study, etc.)
• Duration (45/90 min)
• Speaker name(s)
• Speaker biography (max 150 words)
• Description (approx 250 words)

If you are interested in knowing more about the conference you may like to consult the website for previous years’ editions at www.accu.org/conference for background information.

Speakers running one or more full 90 minute sessions receive a special conference attendance package including free attendance, and assistance with their travel and accommodation costs.  Speakers filling a 45 minute slot qualify for free conference attendance on the day of their session.

The conference has always benefited from the strength of its programme, making it the highlight of the year for many attendees. Please help us make 2009 another successful event.

I’m looking forward to seeing you there,
Giovanni Asproni
ACCU 2009 Conference Chair

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(OK, I added the reference to Lisp above but there was actually a pretty good session on Lisp there this year so I have some justification.)

Ian Ringrose has pointed me at this 30 minute screencast on T4 Templates by David Hayden.

Worth watching if you’d like to get a basic understanding of T4 Templates.

A recent study in software project failure between 1998 and 2005 doesn’t make for pretty reading with the cost of project failure across the European Union estimated at €142 billion in 2004.

The research looked at over 200 projects of various sizes in a variety of sectors.

Although the text and tabular data doesn’t match up (unless I misunderstood it) it looks like none of the projects were cancelled after an initial feasibility study. This 100% success rate strikes me as a little fishy and I wonder if some of the projects that got through this stage were actually a bit ‘iffy’ in the first place? The statement that “ leadership, stakeholder and risk management issues are not factored into projects early on and in many instances cannot formally be written down for political reasons“ suggests to me that projects were pushed through in some cases despite people warning against them.

The top three failure issues identified were:

• Lack of Business Process alignment (i.e. it didn’t do what the business needed)
• Requirements Management (i.e. nobody knew what the business needed)
• Overspends (i.e. they spent a lot of money trying to find out what the business needed but they had to build something while this was happening and predictably ended up building something the business didn’t need.)

The authors call for more project methodology as the way to address this although this seems to me to be more of the same approach that contributed to the problem in the first place.

The observant among you will have noticed that Software Acumen are now the exclusive UK and Ireland distributors of the Axivion Bauhaus Suite.

Bauhaus is a solution for stopping software erosion -  the constant decay of the internal structure of a software system that occurs in all phases of software development and maintenance.

Bauhaus is based on over 150 man-years of research at the universities of Stuttgart and Bremen. Axivion was set up a couple of years ago to productise the research but still gets regular input from the research community.

Bauhaus stops software erosion by pinpointing the causes of erosion using a set of complementary software analysis tools. These include:

Software Architecture Visualization: Lets you explore the architecture of your software “as is”.

Software Architecture Checking: Highlights discrepancies between your intended architecture and the architecture “as is” allowing you to enforce architectural conformance.

Software Cycle Detection: Helps you remove cyclic dependencies between parts of the software and so make them independently testable and modifiable.

Software Metrics: Provide you with key measurements about different aspects of the software.

Software Clone Detection: Detects duplicate and near-duplicate parts of the software (on average making up 20% of a code base).

Software Interface Analysis: Lets you explore dependencies and connections between different parts of the software.

Software Component Detection: Finds logical groupings of elements of the software.

Software Dead Code Detection: Helps remove parts of the software that are not used.

Software Dominance Analysis: Shows the degree of locality of elements in the source.

There’s also a scripting add-on with which you can add your own analyses or integrate your analyses with Bauhaus data. This add-on uses Python on top of Bauhaus’s open APIs.

Bauhaus analysis tools are available for the C, C++, C#, Java, Ada, Visual Basic and COBOL languages making it a very comprehensive solution, even for multi-language development teams.

Customers include Robert Bosch, Raiffeisen Bausparkasse, Versant, Nero and Sick AG.

I’ll be writing more about Bauhaus in the coming months so keep an eye out if you are interested in stopping software erosion.

The BCS Software Practice Advancement group has announced details of 5 evening talks from 6 leading experts looking at the State of the Art in software development. The series is charged at £75 for BCS & SPA members and £90 for non-members including refreshments.  All talks take place at the BCS Davidson Building in London:

On Friday 19 September, Kevin McGuire (Eclipse UI Architect) talks about development tools and environments, covering the thinking that’s leading to new approaches in Eclipse 4.

On Monday 30 September social complexity expert and Europe’s leading Scrum trainer Joseph Pelrine will talk about effective development teams and how they work inside organisations.

On Monday 6 October Rob James (HSBC) and Eoin Woods (Barclays Global Investors) draw on their extensive experience of systems and technology in large organisations to present a snapshot of enterprise architecture.

On Monday 13 October, Adobe platform evangelist Andrew Shorten talks about new developments in application architecture.

On Monday 20 October IBM Architecture practice lead Nick Ababurko will talk about how he’s tackled some of the biggest and most complex projects that IBM have been involved with.

Full details on the talks and speakers are available here. 

If you have any interest in model-driven software development you should check out the 3 day openArchitectureWare Power Workshop we are now offering in Cambridge in partnership with the folks from itemis.

These workshops are designed for developers who want to move from simply modelling software to model-driven software development (MDSD).

During the workshop, the concepts and theories of model-driven software development are explained using the openArchitectureWare open-source MDSD Framework. The workshop is hands-on with a strong focus on acquiring practical experience of the various toolsets used.

The workshop covers:

• the basics of model driven development
• an introduction to the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF)
• the openArchitectureWare workflow engine
• textual domain-specific languages and Xtext
• code generation from models using Xpand and Xtext
• model validation
• creation and use of generator cartridges
• meta-modelling
• model-to-model transformation
• best practices for Model-Driven Software Development

The next course will be presented in Cambridge from September 22nd-24th by Karsten Thoms from itemis.

The fees for the 3 day course (including training materials, lunch and tea / coffee) are £1200 + VAT but if you book more than 3 weeks ahead of the workshop start date we’ll knock off 25%.

The Call for Speakers for next year’s annual BCS Software Practice Advancement conference is now available.

The conference takes place from 5-8 April 2009 at the Robinson Centre, Bedfordshire, England.

Here’s the blurb:

The SPA Conference, now in its 17th year, is the place where leading software development practitioners gather to share their latest thinking.themes are only given as an indication of possible sessions.

You’ll find its interactive sessions, high proportion of attendees who are also presenters, and residential nature make SPA a unique and memorable conference. Many attendees return year after year. You’ll meet expert participants who as as keen to learn and discover as they are to share what they know.

We welcome submissions from everyone - you don’t have to be an expert or an experienced presenter. You’ll be supported by well-established shepherding process which provides assistance and support to all presenters.

Presenters pay a reduced rate for the conference, and this year you might be able to attend for free! We will be awarding a free place to the best proposal from a new presenter. You qualify if you’ve never presented at SPA, even if you’re submitting with a co-presenter who has.

Presenting at SPA is great for your profile within the software development community. We’re looking for session proposals which are interactive and leading edge, possibly even experimental. They can be about technology or teams, practice or process - in fact anything to do with improving software development. They can be as main stream or niche as you like - we select proposals on their merit not on their trendiness. The suggested

The submission deadline is  6pm on Monday 15th September 2008.

I’ve spoken at SPA for the past four years and really enjoy the experience. Unlike many other conferences the program committee and assorted speaking veterans [1] spend lots of time on reviewing each session proposal and providing feedback to session proposers. If you are accepted then you’ll be allocated a shepherd, usually an experienced SPA speaker, to guide you through the process of preparing your session. This provides very valuable support even if you’ve spoken many times before as it helps you tune your session for the typical SPA audience.

I’m planning to volunteer at the conference again so if you do make it to the event come and say hello.

[1] I’ve been part of the group to review session proposals for the past couple of years but wouldn’t yet consider myself a veteran - there are a few people who attend who have been to every single SPA (formerly OT) conference…

Many of the speakers at June’s Code Generation 2008 event have been kind enough to allow us to put their slides on the conference web site after the event. All slides are copyright their respective owners unless otherwise noted.

Keynotes

• Matching Supply and Demand: Challenges in Model-Based Code Generation for QoS-Constrained Software (Bran Selic) PDF (4.93 Mb)
• The Domain-Specific IDE (Steve Cook) PDF (4.38 Mb), Powerpoint (3.83 Mb)

Other Sessions

• Model-Driven SOA: Synchronize Business Planning with the IT Design Process (Ian Barnard) PDF (2.00 Mb)
• Supporting the Model-driven Development of Component-based Adaptive Systems (Nelly Bencomo) PDF (2.38 Mb)
• Enterprise Level Code Generation (Matthew Fowler) Powerpoint (884 kb)
• Using Eclipse Modeling Tools to develop LEGO Mindstorms Robots (Peter Friese, Frank Zimmermann) PDF (1.85 Mb)
• Evangelizing Code Generation: A Case Study of Incremental Adoption (Brooke Hamilton) PDF (3.00 Mb)
• Strategies for Generating Code from Microsoft DSL Tools and T4 Text Templates (Brooke Hamilton) PDF (224 kb)
• Building industrial sensors with Model-Driven Software Development (Bernhard Merkle) PDF (3.02 Mb)
• MDD: Models, frameworks & code generation: some experiences building business software (Pedro J. Molina) PDF (2.22 Mb)
• Putting It All Together (Michael Osmond) PDF (509 kb)
• A Practical Guide to Code Generation using Model Driven Architecture and Executable UML (Chris Raistrick, Ian Wilkie) PDF (1.71 Mb)
• Using openArchitectureWare for M2M and M2T (Karsten Thoms, Sven Efftinge, Jan Köhnlein) PDF (1.86 Mb)
• Implementation Techniques for Domain-Specific Languages (Markus Völter) PDF (3.14 Mb)
• Building Interpreters with EMF, Xtext and Scala (Markus Völter) PDF (2.15 Mb)

For slides for the sessions by Risto Pohjonen, Steven Kelly and Juha-Pekka Tolvanen - please contact MetaCase directly.

Audio-Recorded Sessions
Several conference sessions were audio-recorded. We will release edited copies of these as time (and energy) allows…