Software Modeling Blog

BPMN Composer tool

jordi — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:05:48 +0000

Today we have a guest post by Yves Yang introducing his tool BPMN Composer (“The Modeler that is 100% BPMN 2.0″). Enter Yves: BPMN is a standard initiated in the early 2000s by a group called Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), which has now merged into the OMG. The initial objective was to deal with

101companies: One system – more than 100 alternative software implementations

jordi — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:33:14 +0000

Ralf Lämmel’s visit is the perfect excuse to blog about his great project: 101 companies, created together with Thomas Schmorleiz and Andrei Varanovich. The idea behind 101 companies is simple, let’s try to have as many implementations as possible for the same scenario, a simple Human Resource Management System (the so-called 101companies System) so that

More Geek/Programmers jokes in the Humor page

jordi — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:35:05 +0000

Check the new additions to our humor page. If you haven’t watched it yet, I strongly recommend to take a look at the WAT talk (and some people still complain about the imprecise semantics of modeling languages!) Welcome of other links to add to the page are appreciated! If you enjoyed this post you can

Why you need to learn OCL

jordi — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:15:47 +0000

Yes, I´m a declared OCL fanboy (plenty of my research work revolves around OCL) but I truly believe that time has come for you to learn OCL (Object Constraint Language). Let me give you just two powerful reasons for that: OCL is everywhere. You can use it to define constraints on models (and derivation rules,

Very high customer acquisition cost for MDD tools

jordi — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:33:02 +0000

MDD tool vendors differ in many aspects but they have one thing in common. They all (well, all those I’ve interviewed or I’ve discussed with, which I do believe are a representative sample) agree that the cost of customer acquisition is really high. Roughly speaking, you must first attract their attention (e.g. sponsoring this site

pywebuml – create UML class diagrams from Java, C# and python files

jordi — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:36:50 +0000

Pywebml is a new addition to our list of UML tools for python. Pywebml uses graphviz to create a UML class diagram representing your python (and also Java and C#) code. According to the author: “The difference to other UML tools that I have seen is that the data will be saved in a webpage

INRIA Postdoc position in MDE and Cloud Computing available

jordi — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 01:58:39 +0000

Join AtlanMod as an INRIA postdoc for 16 months. You can read below the proposed description (though we are open to listen to your preferred topics if you want to propose your own and fits our research interests). To apply, please visit the INRIA recruitment page and select the position entitled “ATLANMOD – Modeling in

Free and online Model Thinking course

jordi — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:41:58 +0000

You can now register for this free and online course on Model Thinking. From the course web page: “Evidence shows that people who think with models consistently outperform those who don’t. And, moreover people who think with lots of models outperform people who use only one. … Models help us to better organize information. Models

Creating DSLs, a word of caution

jordi — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:09:17 +0000

As all (relatively) new techniques, we are still in the process of learning when and how creating a DSLs is the best solution for a given software development scenario. Otherwise, we may end up following again the technology hype cycle (as already happened with UML; we are still paying the consequences) and fall trap of

Why did I fail with the online code-generation services – Advise(II): Don’t sell to developers

jordi — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:21:25 +0000

(cross-posted from the “Stories of a (failed) entrepreneur” blog) This is the second in a series of posts trying to explain what I think went wrong with my attempt of selling online code-generation services, that I end up giving up for free due to the lack of clients. In the previous post, I recommended to