As I am writing these lines, I am waiting for my flight to San Francisco, where I will be attending ICSE, and presenting two workshop papers: one at Models in Software Engineering (MiSE), and one at Developing Tools as Plug-Ins (TOPI). If you are in the San Francisco area in the next two weeks and want to catch up, drop me an email!
I should probably have written about the two accepted papers earlier, but as attentive readers will guess from the previous post, I have been busy with submitting my PhD dissertation, which left me with very little time (if at all) for anything else.
The MiSE paper is called “Issues in Representing Domain-Specific Concerns in
Model-Driven Engineering“, and I have written it together with my supervisors, Yijun Yu and Michel Wermelinger, and Zhenjiang Hu, from NII, Japan. It is a position paper in which we argue the need for several ways of representing a domain-specific concern on (possibly different) models, as well as bidirectional transformations between them to keep them in sync. Then we discuss more far-fetched plans, such as the interactions between several domain-specific concerns on the same model.
The TOPI paper, which I wrote with my supervisors, is called “Developing a Domain-Specific Plugin for a Modelling Platform: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly“. We reflect on our experience of developing a plug-in for IBM Rational Software Architect, which itself can be seen as a (collection of) plug-in(s) for Eclipse. We report on what motivated our choices, as well as which problems we encountered, and which benefits we got from using Rational Software Architect instead of another platform, or instead of writing a tool from scratch. Even though I think I can blame Rational Software Architect for a few white hairs on my head, all in all it saved us massive amounts of time and effort. In addition to presenting my paper, I will also give a demo of the tool. If you miss the demo and would like to have a go with the tool, or if you want to discuss it further, please feel free to ask me, and I’ll gladly show you how it works.
You can get both papers from Open Research Online, the Open University’s online repository of publications. If I am not mistaken, the preprint PDFs should be available free of charge.