ASM'07

The experts within modeling of Abstract State Machines meet at the ASM'07 workshop in Grimstad, 7th-9th of June. For more information look at the workshop homepage. Companies are invited to freely attend the presentations, however full participation at the workshop requires registration.

Notes from guest lecture about Release Management in Open Source projects

The nature of Open Source projects is that they are highly distributed and the involvement and effort of each developer/committer changes over time which in turn puts some challenges on how to manage releases. Several notably Open Source projects have adapted time-based release management and Martin Michlmayr has done som interesting research in his Phd. work into the benefits and challenges this has provided to the projects.

One important benefit is the attention that each release gives the project. It is also easier to attract both users and developers if there are regular releases compared to several years in between each release, which have often been the case for some of the big Open Source projects.
Some of the drawbacks with time-based releases are increase in the number of releases which could result in less testing for each release and that there are increased number of different versions in production because users upgrade at different intervals.

Another challenge is how to balance time-based releases with radical changes to the project such as big rewrites, changes in architecture etc. However if a project is well put together (easy to test, modularized etc.) in the first place radical changes should be possible in parallel with the time-based releases. Martins conclusion from following the introduction of time-based releases in the projects Debian, GCC, GNOME, Linux kernel, OpenOffice.org, Plone and X.org is that the projects have experienced mostly good benefits such as increased motivation among the developers, better planning etc.

Another trend is more continuously updates in addition to the time-based releases which is used by X.org, Open Office, Eclipse etc. however this requires a good framework for handling the components/bundles and dependencies (we are actually discussing the possibility of a guest-lecture about OSGi which seeks to solve some of these issues).

About 15 people attended of which most were AUC students/staff, but also a few from companies.

Open Source and Quality Assurance

On Wednesday 9th of May (1415 until approx. 16.00, Auditorium F, Agder University College, Kampus Grimstad), Martin Michlmayr will give a guest lecture about Open Source and Quality Assurance. Martin Michlmayr is pursuing a Phd degree within QA in free and open source software projects. Formerly Martin was a project manager in the Debian Linux project. More information about Martin and his projects is available at http://www.cyrius.com/

Guest lecture (16/4): Textual model representations in Eclipse using TEF

Models are abstract descriptions of a system. What is relevant information and what is not often depends on the concrete task to be performed on the model (editing, analysis, discussion, simulation). Different views of a model require different concrete representations. This lecture will show and discuss different techniques to separate models from their concrete textual representation, based on the Model-View-Controller pattern. We will use a tool (TEF) that allows to create semantically rich Eclipse text editors for different concrete syntaxes of the same meta-model.

The lecture will take place 16th of April at 09:00 (AUD C at AUC, Kampus Grimstad), with a one hour short intro to the subject followed by a 1,5 hour in-depth description. Afterwards there will be a hands on tutorial on the tool TEF (approximately two hours).

The lecture will be given by Markus Scheidgen which is currently pursuing his Phd on the use of object-oriented meta-modelling in language and language tool development at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.

Statistical and Syntactic Pattern Recognition

A one week course in Statistical and Syntactic Pattern Recognition starts Tuesday 10 April at 1200 hours in Aud C. The course is open for external candidates and participants from companies are very welcome to enter. To participate in the course the participant should have qualifications similar to entering a masters program (i.e. bachelor degree or similar). The course will be given by John B. Oommen, Professor at Carleton University, Canada and Professor II at Agder University College. More information about the course is available here.

Trolltech guest lecture about Qt Jambi and Greenphone

As previously announced we are co-organizing SWEng SIG meetings with guest lectures at AuC. The first lecture is by Trolltech about Qt Jambi and Greenphone, Monday March 5th at 14.15 in Aud Min. The lecture will last one hour and afterwards we will have a SIG meeting (open for anyone) with an informal discussion about the topics covered in the lecture and anything else for that matter.

The lecture should be of high relevance to anyone who has an interest in mobile applications, mobile devices and open source. If you are working with cross-platform application development and application development targeting mobile devices you should not miss this opportunity.

Qt is used for cross-platform application development and Qt Jambi is a technology that offers the Qt API to Java programs, enabling native looking rich client Java applications. Greenphone is a Linux mobile development device. Visit the Trolltech to learn more about the company, Qt Jambi and Greenphone.

New organization of the SW Engineering SIG

This year we will evaluate a new way of organizing the SW Engineering SIG. The informal discussions of the group meetings will be combined with formal guest lectures at AuC. This means that whenever there is an interesting (guest) lecture at AuC, we will coorganize this with a SIG meeting and announce it within the SIG community. After the lecture we will have an informal discussion in a similar fashion as with previous SIG meetings. We hope this will attract more people to join the SIG community.

Coming up soon is a guest lecture from Trolltech about Qt Jambi and/or Greenphone. This event will be announced properly when the date is finalized.