Domain-Specific Modeling

Published October 28th, 2009 Under Books | Leave a Comment

Domain-specific modeling (DSM) is an approach articulated around three elements: a specific modeling language, code generation and a domain framework. The book authors work for a company that has been proposing a DSM tool since the last century. This make them first-hand experts on the topic, but you have also to remind which side they are when they talk about DSM compared to other approaches. The authors are conscious of this and discuss it openly, so that the reader can be aware of the situation. This being said, this book is an excellent and convincing presentation of what is domain-specific modeling, what it is not and how it relates to generic modeling approaches like UML. It contains more than 100 pages of real case studies showing how you can use DSM in different contexts (embedded software, insurance, etc). Finally, a final part guides you in details through the different steps needed to create a DSM solution. This part contains an important decision guide that will allow you to evaluate if your domain is suited for a DSM effort.

The book is very well written and is certainly a must read for every software developer who could be involved in the development of software that has some “product” attributes, that is software projects that involve repeated development efforts based on a common domain knowledge. It will also allow you to think and understand more deeply what is modeling and how you can reuse the initial investments in understanding the domain and creating the first products.

The website of the book is http://www.dsmbook.com/

Reference: “Domain-Specific Modeling – Enabling Full Code Generation”, Steven Kelly and Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, John Wiley & Sons, 427 pages

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

November Software Development Conferences

Published October 26th, 2009 Under Conferences | Leave a Comment

Here is a list of software development related conferences that will take place in November and that have media partnerships with Methods & Tools:

* ApacheCon US 2009, November 2-6 2009, Oakland, USA

* IT Leadership Forum, November 2-4 2009, Phoenix, USA

* Agile Development Practices Conference, November 9-13, Orlando, USA

* Devoxx, November 16-20 2009, Antwerp, Belgium

* ProjectWorld & World Congress for Business Analysts, November 16-18 2009, Anaheim, USA

* Handcrafted Bulletproof CSS, November 23 2009, London, UK

* Agile Specifications, BDD and Testing eXchange, November 27 2009, London, UK

* Lean & Kanban eXchange, December 1 2009, London, UK

* droidcon London, December 2 2009, London, UK

* Ruby on Rails eXchange, December 3 2009, London, UK

Find more conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

Linkopedia October 2009

Published October 14th, 2009 Under Links | Leave a Comment

Top 10 reasons why teams fail with Acceptance Testing

Software quality metrics and model

Comparing Open Source Agile Project Management Tools

Icon Search Engine

Refractor – Diagrammer for .Net Assemblies, also support for Javascript.

KanbanFX – A JavaFX implementation of a Kanban board

Article: The Clojure programming language

Article: Scrum in old fashioned software environments?

Video: The Myth of the Genius Programmer

Video: What are the Roles In Scrum

Video: Top 10 Things in Ruby that Every .NET Developer Needs to Know

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory, the software development blogs aggregator or the software development videos directory.

1500 Tools to Assist Software Developers

Published October 12th, 2009 Under Methods & Tools | Leave a Comment

Created in 2007, the Software Development Tools Directory has now more than 1500 references. It is one of the rare web sites where you can see on the same location both commercial and open source software development tools. Tools are categorized by programming language, license, operating system or software development function (software testing, project management, database, IDE, user interface,  etc.).  The Open Source category is the most important one with 770 tools.

The five most popular open source tools in the directory are:
* IceScrum – agile project management
* ERmodeller – a CASE tool for data modeling
* ArgoUML – UML modeling with Java code generation
* StarUML – UML modeling tool
* Arbiter – requirements gathering and acceptance testing tool

Report on the iPhone Developer Day in Zurich

Published October 9th, 2009 Under Conferences | Leave a Comment

I had the chance with around 80 other people to attend the iPhone Developer Day in Zurich yesterday. The event was co-organized by Keynode and Trifork. I was warmly welcomed by the organizers  Jorn, Christian and Andy. The organization was good, with break after every talk that allows having a fresh mind for the next presenter. If you have only one thing to retain about software development for the iPhone is that you have to manage memory. Read more

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