Persiflage and Piffle

When starting a new model I seldom want to start from a blank canvas; instead I’d like to use a template to get us going. Within RSA/RSM there are already some templates provided, and whilst useful, they are (necessarily) very generic.

A simple way to enable this is to create a model from an existing model from the New UML Model wizard page.

Whilst this approach is workable for an ad-hoc approach to copying models, it’s far from ideal, especially in an environment where you would like your modelling team(s) to be using a consistent set of templates. A better approach would be to hook into the “Create model from standard template” mechanism. Whilst this isn’t particularly difficult to do, it doesn’t appear to be that well documented, with the only reference I found being a support page relating to RSA v6 (which is using an export wizard that doesn’t appear to be available in v7).

The way it’s done is by creating an Eclipse plug-in with an extension of the “com.ibm.xtools.modeler.ui.wizards.template” extension point. Under this extension you specify a directory which contains the model to be used as a template, an image to be used in the wizard page and a template definition file that pulls the whole thing together and provides some descriptive text.

Since I think that it’s likely that it’s likely there are people out wanting to do this who are not Eclipse plug-in developers, and in fact may not even be a developer (in the case of business analysts, for example). I’ve decided to write an article that goes through it in a lot more detail. Trust me, it’s simple, and you won’t need to write a single line of code.

Article: Create an RSA model template

Hopefully these days, most developers are aware of UML profiles and the value that they can add to a development team. As with other UML 2.x compliant modelling tools, IBM’s RSA tooling has direct support for the creation and deployment of profiles (including into an RSM install).

Although I’ve produced profiles before, I’d always lived with having to create a generic UML element and then apply the stereotype afterwards. If your profile is something that relates to domain in which you’re working, it’s likely that you will want to create these elements reasonably frequently. In this case, this long hand approach can become a little tiresome.

So, given that RSA is based on Eclipse, the platform that promotes extensibility, I wondered whether there would be a way to extend RSA’s modelling user interface. Not holding out much hope I had a quick look in the help - only to find that indeed it does.
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The server side has an article about agile offshoring. It’s quite a good article highlighting some of the things you need to consider, and my experiences of working with an offshore team are quite similar. The thing I wanted to comment on isn’t so much the article as one of the comments.
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Whilst I’m not sure I’d take the argument quite as far as Jason Gorman in this blog article “Good Enough” Really Means “Almost Perfect”, I’m right with him in his sentiment.
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If you’re interested in software development, the relationship between design and construction and whether the discipline is engineering or an art, then I very much recommend spending 15 minutes reading Jack W Reeves’s What is Software Design? article. It puts an interesting slant on the term software design to help align it with other engineering disciplines.

The article is 15 years old and as with all good things relating to our industry, timeless.

Today, whilst skim reading an article for a product, I found myself head in hands, screaming “No, no, no!”. The product in question has a CSV import facility so that you can load up some important data quickly, for example:

IDENTIFIER, NAME, EMAIL
1,Nermal,123@456.com
2,Pooky,789@abc.com

Nothing wrong there, I’m happy with CSV as an import/export mechanism (see KISS principle).

Here’s what got me.
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Scott Ambler’s article on the consequences of fixed-price IT projects gives some good coverage of the high level issues with fixed price (or fixed bid, if you prefer) projects. I wholeheartedly agree with what he’s saying in principle, but what about in practice?
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In my why have all your eggs in one basket? blog post, I described how you could completely customise the structure of your Eclipse projects to be almost any thing you wanted. Perhaps though, I may have been a little misleading, and could have implied that I think that this kind of frigging around is a good thing.
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