The latest Software Engineering Radio podcast has Bran Selic being interviewed about UML2 and modelling in general.

Bran was a keynote at our Code Generation 2008 conference in June and the recording was made at the event.

I’m very pleased to note that three sponsors have already signed-up for next June’s Code Generation 2009 event.

New sponsors Soft Fluent and itemis are joined by returning sponsors NT/e.

French company Soft Fluent is an innovative company aimed at industrializing the software development of data-oriented applications on the .NET platform. Founded by former Microsoft employees with strong development experience, SoftFluent is one of the most advanced companies in this segment and has quickly been recognized as a company delivering high value consulting services for development projects and software businesses, as well as on-demand development. Soft Fluent are Gold sponsors of CG2009.

Germany company itemis develops efficient software solutions and consults in all matters of information technology. Their main focus  is model-driven software development (MDSD) as well as the provision of tools for the implementation of embedded systems. itemis AG is a strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation and offers a broad  spectrum of services specifically for the Open Source sector. We also partner with itemis to deliver openArchitecture courses in the UK. itemis are Silver sponsors of CG2009.

Last but not least, NT/e who provide products and solutions based on their JeeWiz solution have returned as Bronze sponsors.

Keep tuned for more information on Code Generation 2009 in the next week or two.

If you’re into Model-Driven Software Development or Software Product Lines then Thursday’s Software East event at Downing College, Cambridge is the place to be.

Steven Kelly of MetaCase will give a talk on ‘Moving from Coding to Model-Driven Development’. Steven is well-known in the Domain-Specific Modelling (DSM) community and is co-author of a well-known book on DSM.

Danilo Beuche of pure-systems will also give a talk titled ‘Get started with Software Product Lines’ that investigates what to do and what not to do when moving to a product line approach.

Entry £15 including light buffet by preregistration at www.software-east.co.uk .

January’s Software East event will have ‘Building a Software Business’ as its theme.

Event details are being firmed up at the moment but the focus of the event will be a panel session considering questions such as:

• Do you need a ‘big’ idea?
• How to find customers
• Building the ‘right’ product
• How to fund the business
• Scaling up
• Problems of success
• Are software businesses ‘different’?

If you have questions you’d like to see answered by the panel then please bring them along or send them to me in advance.

I’ll be leading the panel and Neil Davidson and Allan Kelly have already agreed to share their experiences so it should be a very interesting session. As with other Software East events there will also be plenty of time scheduled for chatting to other participants.

I’ll be delivering my favourite talk again at this Wednesday’s SPA Cambridge event.

When Good Architecture Goes Bad - will see me describe the problems that can occur when software architecture ‘as-is’ deviates from architecture ‘as-intended’. I’ll be running the session as a workshop with people working in small groups to share their architectural problems and (hopefully) come up with some examples of how they addressed these.

The event takes place at Microsoft Research Cambridge with a light buffet available from 19:00 and the workshop starting at 19:30. Please preregister here: http://www.bcs-spa.org/cgi-bin/view/SPA/WhenGoodArchitectureGoesBad

I’ve run this session in several variants this year at SPA, ACCU, Embedded Masterclass and Software Architect. Hopefully this variant will generate as much discussion.

Just a quick news snippet.

ACCU have joined as a supporting partner for our new Software East evening event series starting in Cambridge on 20th November. The usual cost of attending is £15 (including some food) but if you’re an ACCU member you can get 10% off this by using the ‘ACCU’ code.

There’s a nice pure::variants case study developing at Danfoss Drives in Denmark. The pure-systems team has been working with them on moving their VLT frequency converter software over to a Software Product Lines approach and this initiative has been recognised by the award of an IBM Denmark Software Innovation Prize (in Danish).

Danfoss Drives is using pure::variants to help manage and automate their Software Product Line life cycle and pure-systems consultants have also been involved with product line architecture, implementation and tool integration as well as providing regular team review and coaching.

The team have written a couple of yet-to-be-published papers about the project which I can pass on to interested parties. I’m also expecting to see more results from this project over the next year. Alternatively, if you want it from the horse’s mouth as it were, Danilo Beuche of pure-systems will be speaking on Software Product Lines at our Software East event in Cambridge on 20th November.

The latest Software Engineering Radio episode has Bernhard Merkle of SICK, a friend of mine, speaking on Architecture Analysis.

Here’s the synopsis: “During Evolution of a software system, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the originally planned software architecture. Often an architectural degeneration happens because of various reasons during the development phases. In this session we will be looking how to avoid such architectural decay and degeneration and how continuous monitoring can improve the situation (and avoid architectural violations). In addition we will look at “refactoring in the large” and how refactoring can be simulated. A new family of “lint like tools for software architectures” is currently emerging in the marketplace I will show some examples and how they scale and support you in real world projects.”

The Axivion Bauhaus Suite, which Software Acumen distributes in the UK & Ireland, is one of the tools mentioned in the podcast. In fact it was Bernhard that drew my attention to the toolset a while back as he’d been using it at SICK and shared his experiences of it at the ACCU conference.

Of course this podcast also ties into the themes of my When Good Architecture Goes Bad conference sessions I ran earlier in the year. If it can raise awareness of these new classes of tool then so much the better as far as I’m concerned.