I’m pleased to announce a new online portal dedicated to the community of software factory practitioners. The DevRevolution Software Factories Community Portal is the first in a series of portals designed to advance the state of the art in software development. Built by developers for developers, the DevRevolution Software Factories Community Portal offers a variety of resources for software factory practitioners at all levels, from beginners to experts. The site include a forum for discussions, an aggregation of software factory blogs and news feeds, and a catalog of additional software factory resources available on the web, complete with user ratings. Please visit the DevRevolution Software Factories Community Portal to participate in this new Community of Practice. And tell a friend!

Many thanks to Edward Bakker and Jezz Santos for their invaluable help in creating this community portal.

http://sf.devrevolution.com

I was planning to attend the Microsoft SOA and Businss Process Conference in Redmond this week, but alas personal matters prevented me from being there. I'm sorry I missed it. The keynote address by Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Server & Tools Business, contained a major announcement. He announced an ambitous new program called Oslo. According to the official announcement, Oslo is a set of technical investments that will will unify Microsoft's services and modeling platforms by moving from a world where models describe the application to a world where models are the application.

Oh my gosh! This is nothing short of huge.

Basically Oslo consists of two major initiatives:

• An SOA platform that consists of clients, "on premise" software, and "in the cloud" services. These capabilities will be delivered through BizTalk Server "V6", System Center "V5", Visual Studio "V10", BizTalk Services "V1" and .NET Framework "V4".
• A modeling platform that enables higher level declarative descriptions of an application. I'm assuming that this will be a consolidation of the various Microsoft modeling tools currently available, with the Distributed System Designers playing center stage.

I've been a big fan of modeling as a way to increase productivity of software developers. Although declarative models will never completely replace code, much of what we implement in code today can be done faster and more easily with models. What's more, a model can be used to greatly simply the deployment process because it describes the application in a way that allows the runtime environment to be automatically provisioned.

If Microsoft pulls this one off, it will significantly change the way we build and deploy software. I believe this is called a paradigm shift.

I was fortunate to participate in several MSDN podcasts on the subject of model-driven development with such industry luminaries as Jack Greenfield, Steven Kelly, Mauro Regio and Brian Selic. I was the voice of the average joe schmo developer trying to make sense out of all the amazing things these other panelists had to say. It was both fun and a bit intimidating at the same time. It was also quite popular with the listening audience - these podcasts received thousands of downloads.

Well I just noticed that the podcasts have been transcribed, and the transcriptions are available on MSDN here:

Model-Driven Development (Part 1)
Model-Driven Development (Part 2)

Although the transcription is a bit mangled in some places, they generally did a good job of capturing what was said. Of course, you can always listen to the original podcasts:

ARCast 5: Model-Driven Development
ARCast 6: Model-Driven Development

At first I didn't like the Microsoft Solution Framework (MSF). All I had to go on was the MSF process guidance and whatever was floating around in blogs and forums. It all seemed rather obscure and vague. However, as I work with the process template I'm starting to develop a new appreciation for it. Although the process guidance has plenty of room for improvement, and the MSF CMMI template is overkill for most situations, the work items and reports in the MSF Agile template are actually quite useable.

I was poking around the blogosphere when I came across a series of posts from Clara Oscura. She has done a fine job of clarifying the terms and concepts used in MSF. I hope her work makes it into the MSF process guidance.

MSF: Tracks, workstreams, activities, areas and iterations
MSF: Tracks, workstreams, activities, areas and iterations (II)
MSF: Tracks, workstreams, activities, areas and iterations (III)

Thanks for the nice work Clara!

An important component of a software factory is guidance. After all, a software factory is a highly specialized IDE for product a specific type of software. Without some instructions on the proper use of this highly specialized IDE the developer is pretty much lost, left to bump around in the maze until a sense of direction is established. Good guidance eliminates this disorientation, allowing the software engineer to use the factory productively right away.

An excellent source of information on engineering good guidance can be found at:
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/GuidanceEngineering.HomePage

Hey, I guess this guidance engineering wiki could be called meta-guidance!

J.D. Meier reports on his blog that the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team has just released new prescriptive guidance for Visual Studio Team System. This is a CodePlex project that contains a wealth of guidance on best practices around Team System. It looks like they are focusing on source control first, but I'm sure that additional guidance will be added in the future related to test and build.

This morning I was reading Scott Ambler's excellent article on Single Source Information, which references Brad Appleton's Locality of Reference Documentation (LoRD) article. In a nutshell LoRD states that:

The likelihood of keeping all or part of a software artifact consistent with any corresponding text that describes it, is inversely proportional to the square of the cognitive distance between them.

In other words, if the code is over here and the documentation is over there then the likelihood of keeping them in sync is low. For this reason its best to keep the documentation close to the code. Ideally, the documentation should be in the source code file. This is why both Java and .NET support inline XML documentation comments in source code files. Javadoc and NDoc are both utilities that format these XML documentation comments into help files. Since these XML comments are embedded in the source code file, right next to the classes, methods, properties and events that they describe, the cognitive distance is zero. When a developer changes any of these items, the documentation comments are right there - in the very same spot - ready to be updated as well. It just doesn't get much easier.

Shortly after re-reading these articles, and while the thoughts were still swirling around in my mind, I stumbled across the next generation documentation tool: Sandcastle. According to the overview on the download page:

Wow! Now this sounds like a really useful utility that makes the cognitive distance between code and documentation as close to zero as possible. The beauty of this utility is that it automatically documents the structure of the code, and it also documents intent to the extent that names are descriptives. Now, if your dev team does a good job of keeping the the XML comments in the source code relevant, than this utility automatically documents both structure and intent in a clear and concise manner, while keeping the cognitive distance at zero.

Taking the whole thing one step further, Mike Diehl blogs on how to incorporate Sandcastle into an MSBUILD process. Once you have this up and running, keeping documentation current and relevant just doesn't get any easier!

In an earlier post I promised to make the MSF Analysis Tool available for download.

You can now download it at GotDotNet.

Go there, try it out and let me know what you think. Or better yet, improve the tool and share your enhancements at project workspace on GotDotNet.

You can get a sneak peak at the read me file here:

Read Me - MSF Analysis Tool.doc (34.5 KB)

The first-ever Boise Code Camp was a huge success! It was an all-volunteer effort based on the Code Camp Manifesto. There were 35 presentations on a variety of topics, and the 138 attendees gave it a big thumbs up. I thoroughly enjoyed the event, both as an attendee and a presenter.

As the lead for the methodology track I had the honor and privilege of moderating a panel discussion that explored methodology from several angles: people, environment and tools. The panel members were (from left to right) Dan Ray (Healthwise), Doug Seven (Microsoft), Kevin Call (Micron Technology), Jason Grundy (Treetop Tech), David Starr (Healthwise) and Jim McKeeth (Washington Group). These guys had a wealth of experience to share, and the audience came up with some great questions and observations as well.

I also gave a 90 minute presentation on Software Factories that included a demonstration of the DSL Tools as well as a demonstration of the Guidance Automation Toolkit. The presentation included a discussion of Software Product Lines and also covered the software factory process. Apparently the audience thought it went pretty well, giving the presentation an average rating of 8 out of 9.