Among them is Stuttgart University in collaboration with EADS/Astrium Satellites, with a diploma thesis on modeling an example satellite called “FIRESAT”. The “FIRESAT” example is well described in literature (e.g. Space Mission Analysis and Design, Wertz) and shall thus be established as an open source modeling example in the space-domain. The thesis entitled “FIRESAT as open source example in satellite design” is thought to model the “FIRESAT” mission, systems and subsystems in the VSD data model, to provide an example for modeling satellite systems.

• SQLite as single-user database engine
• Tree browser for profile definitions
• Generic linking between symbols and diagrams
• Support for Windows 7 and Vista – OpenAmeos can now be used without administrative privileges

Links (require a valid customer login on scopeforge.de):

• Binary downloads
• Change log
• Source code

• Unicode support
• SQLite as single-user database engine
• Profiles in the ACD metamodel
• Improved JSPWiki generation and integration

The reason why it took so long, were primarily plenty of regressions caused by the switch to Unicode - because of this, any system which was created before 10.2 also needs to be migrated. Please make sure you familiarize yourself with the impact of switching to Unicode, it is presently not possible to run both 9.x and 10.2 installations on the same database server. The upcoming 9.5 maintenance release will however fix this problem.

Special thanks for their help with Unicode goes to our partner Triad !

SQLite allows to run OpenAmeos on a Linux box without having to install Sybase. The installer is not perfect yet, if you don’t have Sybase, simply leave the relevant fields in the installer screens empty. All example models (both on Windows and Linux) have been converted to SQLite. Furthermore, the SQLite engine is in most cases significantly faster than MS-Jet, in particular for code generation purposes. But SQlite is a single-user engine, we keep on trying to find ways to get some funding for a port to PostgreSQL.

Since we needed profile support in the UML model exports which we use for the VSD project, we added them to the ACD metamodel and the related Ecore and XMI export templates. This might be useful for other purposes, too.

Last but not least, we also extended the JSPWiki generation and integration:

• the diagrams which appear in the Wiki are now SVGs and navigable
• re-generating a wiki will create JSPWiki versions, i.e. any changed pages will appear as new versions in JSPWiki and its change log
• exported wikis can optionally be imported into CodeBeamer, for details, please contact support.

We’ve prepared a more detailed article how to work with this feature.

Links:

• Binary downloads
• Change log
• Source code

The VSD study, led by EADS Astrium, started in 2005 with the objective to analyze and improve the current spacecraft system level system engineering process. Its goal is the consistent application of model-based techniques, in order to have an improved virtual representation of a spacecraft.

ScopeSET will build the MBSE tools and related services. The new tool-set will allow the consistent definition of a spacecraft system level design, covering requirements, functional architecture, physical architecture, AIT and verification definition. All tools will be based on Eclipse and the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF).

Did you ever want to easily tweet about what you’re presently working on ?

Have you ever wanted to have a simple time tracking tool for your CodeBeamer tasks ?

Well, we at ScopeSET pretty much work in a distributed environment all the time, we’re using CodeBeamer, we often ping around to check who’s presently doing what, and sometimes, we even need to track the time we spend on things So there was an idea to combine all those needs into a nice little tool which would make our lives easier. Introducing CBLiveTracker:

With CBLiveTracker, you can pick any task from a CodeBeamer site, set it to your individual in-progress status and press the start button. The tool will update the CodeBeamer task, take the start time and send a twitter message telling everyone who’s interested that you started working on something.

When you finish the task, you simply set the done status and press the stop button. Status and time-spent will be updated in CodeBeamer and another tweet will be sent. That’s pretty much it.

The tool can be downloaded on javaforge.com, either as source or Win32 binary. Further documentation is available there as well.

Please comment if you have any ideas how to improve or adapt the tool.

I well remember the looks of doubt on most of the audience faces, with comments along the lines of “Now we spent years of coming up with a standard like UML and you tell us DSLs are better.” Well, the thing with UML in my opinion is that it has grown into a rather bloated standard which tries to address all possible modeling domains. Add to that the ongoing debate whether it’s better to use profiling or metamodeling to customize it. And on top of it, at OMG, tool-vendors typically try to standardize what they have already implemented. I’m not saying UML is a bad thing, it’s just that this evolution has created an opposite trend.

What I also recall are the days back in the 90s, when CASE was the silver bullet for all kinds of software problems and where we had a plethora of methods and notations. Obviously, at that time, standardization was the only solution to get out of that universe of notational solar systems which were floating around in virtual space. The time has come, though where that standardization effort has developed a momentum of its own, which in a lot of cases is more and more disconnected from end-users. An electrical engineer which needs to collaborate with a software engineer will simply not want to learn UML – which is really just some fancy software thing.

Enter DSLs. On the presentation layer, DSLs most importantly attempt to pick up the user (who is typically an expert in his domain) by using a visualization (aka notation) and a terminology she’s used to. On the storage, and more importantly the interchange layer, the data which is collected and modeled by the expert is however mapped to a metamodel which is ideally common to many different DSLs. Although this common mapping is far from being in use everywhere and is certainly very challenging to design in the beginning, from an overall perspective, such a common metamodel is the big step forward. This is where DSLs have learned from UML and its standardization based on MOF and this is where DSLs significantly differ from the notation universe from the 90s – provided the DSLs are built on a common foundation.

That common foundation is also a technical aspect and in this area, we find another reason why nowadays DSLs can reach a higher level of maturity. With frameworks such as EMF and GMF which in turn build on a proven platform like Eclipse, the technical challenges of creating DSL tools become much more manageable. So much, that these tools are more often built by end-users themselves and less and less by typical tool-vendors. As a result, what used to be proprietary know-how of tool vendors some years ago, now shifts more and more to end-users.

The challenge for tool vendors and consultants in this evolving eco-system is now to focus more on the back-end frameworks and be less dogmatic on how modeling has to be properly done. But that’s a topic for another article …

Scheduling tasks, the challenge

Typically, in any issue tracking system, you work with a list of tasks. This list might be categorized or might be broken down hierarchically, but when it comes to scheduling tasks, you typically do that by moving around task bars in a Gantt chart. This is where the idea started to integrate a project management tool into CodeBeamer so that it would allow to schedule (and monitor) tasks which had previously been created in CodeBeamer. CodeBeamer’s API is well suited to provide the necessary hooks.

The workflow

The following diagram illustrates the workflow which is used for task scheduling with CodeBeamer and GanttProject:

Implementation

As project management tool, we chose GanttProject, for the primary reason that it suffices for the scheduling activity and that it has a relatively simple XML storage format. The required Java code is a straight forward implementation which uses CodeBeamer’s remote API to export all tasks for a given milestone into GanttProject’s XML format.

The following data is exported into the Gantt chart:

• Estimated hours
• Spent hours
• Assignee
• Hierarchical breakdown
• Dependencies

Additionally, task bars can be color coded for different assignees (or red for over-time).

After having scheduled the tasks in GanttProject, the XML file is then imported back into CodeBeamer, task start and end dates as well as task dependencies and parent child relationships are updated.

Noteworthy to mention on the implementation is the usage of a task-type-independent and task-type-specific layer of DTOs on top of the API DTOs. This allows to share common functionality for different exporters and importers.

Source code

The source code for this integration is available on javaforge.com

Next in this series will be an article on a Wiki ChangeLog plugin.

SQLite can replace MS-Jet as repository storage engine on Windows and will typically improve the overall performance of OpenAmeos. On Linux, OpenAmeos can now be used without a Sybase installation.

Unicode has been partially implemented by our partner Triad in Hungary.

In addition to this, we are also considering to include support for UML profiles in various export formats like XMI (-> profiles will be added to the ACD metamodel)

OpenAmeos 10.2 is expected to be available in fall 2009.

VERDE hat zum Ziel, ein methodisches Rahmenwerk zum iterativen, inkrementellen, verifikationsorientierten Entwurf komponentenbasierter Hardware/Software-Architekturen zu definieren. Über maßgeschneiderte  Schnittstellen erfolgt die Integration und Adaption von Test- und Analysewerkzeugen zur Verifikation von domänenspezifischen Anforderungen.

Gemeinsam mit Partner aus der Industrie, Forschung und Lehre wird ScopeSET entsprechende VERDE Lösungen erarbeiten. Das Projekt hat eine Laufzeit von 3 Jahren. Weitere Information werde in Kürze unter einer Projekteigenen Internetadresse veröffentlicht.

For details, see OpenAmeos 10.1 features and the OpenAmeos 10.1 ChangeLog

The source code for this release is available via SVN or as ZIPed archive