This is a sad story. So please do not laugh.
Harri was born a developer. People say, the baby was born with a Silverlight spoon. When he was three weeks old, he wrote his first ‘Hello World’ application.
Continue reading "Satire: Harri Developer and the Knowledge of Domain" »
There are some rumbling on the software factories from MS.
It has been nearly 4 years since Jack Greenfield articulated Microsoft Software factories vision. He talked about state of software engineering in his famous book. We have got bunch of PnP guidance packages(http://msdn2.microsoft.com/hi-in/practices/bb969097(en-us).aspx - scroll to then end of the page) that adresses solution domain rather than the problem domain. To some people, these guidance packages have given a different understanding of software factories rather than what was articulated in the vision. Software factories have become synonymous with code generation. These PnP software factories give good guidance and productivity gains but they are not full vision of software factories.
Every one knows that as of now MS has not released tools to realize all the four pillars ( Software Product Lines, Domain Specific Models, Context Guidance and Architecture Frameworks) of software factory vision. Currently, DSL tools like GME from Vanderbilt university have better features than DSL tools from MS.
Complete vision of software factory as articulated few years back is not realized yet but on the other side MS is coming up with Software factory tools support in next version of Visual Studio "Rosario". Check the DSL tools roadmap . Check the updates that are present in Rosario CTP's. These new tools in Rosario represent a definitely a way forward (assuming that they will make it to final release!) but the question is would they give the kind of benefits envisaged in the software factories vision? Only time will tell.
For latest happenings, refer to software factory community at http://sf.devrevolution.com/
“If creating a cyborg by plugging human limbs and machine components could become a reality, why is it difficult to create software just by plugging other software components?”, a pal once asked me. “The answer is in the question”, I replied, “Creating reusable components is as much of a trick as a cyborg”.
Continue reading "A Refactorability Approach to Software Reusability" »
There was one quote I remember from somewhere: “Code as if the guy who is going to maintain your code is a manic serial killer who knows where you live”. Scary thought, but I swear by it.
Continue reading "Software Factory: Behavior based Meta-Models" »
Software, these days, are so much like the people who build them – disparate, hard to change, easy to break, and an inexplicable dire need to interact with one another. No man is an island, and so are software systems.
Continue reading "Software Factory: Business Semantics based Meta-Models" »
Life is all about using the right punctuations in your language. Between "Spare him, not kill him" and "Spare him not, kill him" there's as much difference as between life and death, albeit the same bunch of words.
Continue reading "Software Factory: Meta-Model - The "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" of DSM" »
Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) does to present day programming languages, what the present day programming languages did to Assemblers – hide the nonsense.
How you wish you could write a software and say – "Write it, Shut it, Forget it"? If only businesses were so simple and straightforward, and everybody in the world understood everybody else every time of the year. Sigh! There is no dearth of dreams.
Continue reading "Software Factory: Adopting DSM for High Evolvement Systems" »
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a model is worth a thousand lines of code. No, seriously. Despite the insistence on loosely couple architectures et. al., the complexity of the system and hence its underlying code has, historically, been the least receptive to changes.
Continue reading "Software Factory: Adopting DSM for High Complexity Systems" »
Have you noticed that dirty stare your developer gives you, when you walk up to him with a change in requirement? Let’s see – there needs to be an impact analysis, change of design, change of code, more dirty stares, updating dependencies, regression tests, more change of code, more dirty stares. And then there is another change in requirement. You figure.
Continue reading "Software Factory: Domain-Specific Modeling" »
Remember the days when you used to punch some quirky looking characters on a flickering green screen they used to call a "computer"? I guess most of us were not even born then.
Continue reading "Software Factory: Towards the Holy Grail of Software Development" »
