Messages

1

General Board / Re: Access to Eclipse Integration Add-In Version 4

« on: March 28, 2009, 10:14:19 pm »

Unfortunately,  that is is in the new BSE edition and above.  I've been exchanging emails with their sales staff on this.

I personally own a Corporate version license and licenses for both Eclipse and Zachman MDG technolgies/integrations for which I paid 145 each.   I'd like to upgrade to BSE edition to pick up the BPEL stuff, but Sparx sales is insisting my upgrade price is the delta between Corporate and BSE -- ie 267 USD --- making no allowances for the fact I already paid for Eclipse and Zachman.   I would have gladly paid something reasonable for the BPEL functions as an upgrade charge and paid the ongoing higher maintenance fees,  BUT their current policy is bad customer relations IMHO and I think I will likely NOT upgrade because of that.  

2

General Board / Re: Large International Project with many contributors

« on: April 24, 2008, 11:50:52 pm »

We are also rolling out large international project.  SQL database and CVS for VC.  Are you planning on doing all the work in the DB and just using SVN for version control OR are you having various smaller projects distributed locally around the world and coordinated with the central DB indirectly thru CVS ?    We are doing the latter because of the WAN access  times for some of our more remote locations.   There are a couple of direct implications for operational practices right off:

1.  AFAIK - The refreshes of any packages in the central db might have to be via Checkout/Undo Checkout.  There might be a way to batch this, but so far I've found it non-obvious.

2.  IF you've got work going on in distributed projects coordinated to central thru VC  AND you use any auto-counters,  you might want to set up each of the distributed projects with different offsets into the autocounter numbering scheme to avoid autocounter collisions at the central db.   GUID's should still be OK, but it's be good to have the human-readable portions unique also.

3

General Board / Re: Setting up CVS with ext protocol

« on: April 03, 2008, 06:34:10 am »

Late reply, but I am doing this using ext and Tortoise CVS.  We use putty for SSH.  Biggest trick is that you need to set the environmental variable CVS_RSH to point to the plink.exe or you will get the error you describe.

4

General Board / Re: Use Cases vs. Scenarios == Advice needed..

« on: February 19, 2008, 01:01:25 am »

Thanks Bruce for this:

Actor::bobCalUser
Actor::productBinstance
Actor::productXinstance

This seems like a helpful framing suggestion to reduce the complexity factor and sort out some noise.  I'll work from this angle for a bit (and keep you apprised).


Thanks to Jan for your description of the UseCase-Actor "satisfaction" relationship --- it's a good reality-check criteria to avoid (personal) madness /thrashing.  

(I'll keep this thread updated as things unfold. )

5

General Board / Re: Use Cases vs. Scenarios == Advice needed..

« on: February 18, 2008, 03:31:15 pm »

Thanks Bruce.  

Regarding your last  two paragraphs, "ProductA"  also has a calendar system, complete with UI -- it's objective is NOT to provide synchronization BETWEEN  ProductB and ProductC but to synchronize WITH them as a (small) product feature of ProductA, either individually or in customer installations which have all three Products.  So the calendar in ProductA has to synchronize with the calendar in  ProductB in the situation where the calendar event may have originated in either product AND the possible actions depend on which system has which role - the same human being may have logins in both systems and may create and view calendar events in either one.  

I'm not disagreeing with the CRUD comments either regarding the CalConnect docs, but manageCalendar and manageCalendarContent seem to me to be so "meta" as to be TRUE, but fairly useless from a product-driving practical perspective.  It seems to me that you have to at least get to a level of business purpose with the use case -- i.e.  manageRecurringMeeting,  maybe even rescheduleRecurringMeeting or cancelInstanceRecurringMeeting.  

Are these not valid business purposes in the Use Case sense ?  They are atomic business results which are initiated by a  (human) actor and may be implemented in a variety of ways, unspecified in the use case.....   In my particular problem,  the system may behave differently in realizing those cases due to the underlying implementations of Products B and C -- (back to my original question).

Bob

6

General Board / Re: Use Cases vs. Scenarios == Advice needed..

« on: February 17, 2008, 01:09:59 pm »

Just FYI.  

The third and particularly fourth documents on the CalConnect reference contain the most information/"use cases"/"scenarios"/Gordian knots.

Regardless of whether these items are "really" use cases or not,  it's still the problem I have to capture and manipulate in the model to make sense of the situation for both development and marketing.  And it definitely matters in each "circumstance" what system you are using and what system originated the appointment/task/contact.  

7

General Board / Re: Use Cases vs. Scenarios == Advice needed..

« on: February 17, 2008, 12:35:15 pm »

Thanks for the prompt reply Thomas.   Let me try and explain why I think they MIGHT be different use cases for the permutations.  

The "worst-case" situations involve recurring appointments or tasks.  Say the User has created a recurring appointment in Product B which has been synchronized to their own calendar in Product A.  They now wish to modify the Nth instance of the recurrence from within Product A.  Because these products (A,B,C) all have different underlying data models and implementations of recurrence, the ACTUAL CAPABILITIES which can be surfaced to the user differ depending on both the originating system and the system on which the action is being performed.  Since what can actually be done differs based on the permutation of originating and receiving system,  I am thinking each permutation is a different use case and/or scenario.

Did that make it any clearer ?

Re your last point on "100 UCs in a calendar sync tool" -- I refer you to the reference set at the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium here :  

http://www.calconnect.org/usecases.shtml

Bob

8

General Board / Use Cases vs. Scenarios == Advice needed..

« on: February 17, 2008, 07:48:10 am »

My company makes a software product (call it Product A) which (loosely speaking) "synchronizes" appointments, task and contact information with two other commercial products (call them Products B and C).   We obviously do not have source access to B and C.   I have been charged with getting a conceptual and product direction grasp on this.

I have a set of (roughly) 100 use cases related to the subject matter from an independent consortium which depict the abstract use cases that arise in calendaring/tasking operations.   What I'd like to do is use these as a "reference set" to discuss the  various implementations of "synchronization" (product A-B, B-C, A-C).

To do this, I need to depict the actual use case a User encounters in product (A/B/C) when the original appointment/task/contact was created in product (A/B/C) -- so there are 9 permutations (A-A, B-B, C-C, A-B, A-C, B-A, B-C, C-A, C-B).  

I can see a number of ways to model this and would like some advice from the real veterans on this board.   The possibilities I see are:

1.  Model each permutation as a use case realization of the relevant abstract use case.

2.  Model each permutation as a scenario within the general reference use case.

3.  Model each RECEIVING product as a use case realization off the relevant abstract use case, with different scenarios for each ORIGINATING product.

4.  Model each ORIGINATING product as a use case realization off the relevant abstract use case,  with different scenarios for each RECEIVING products.

Does anyone have any helpful hints/analytics suggestions on this situation ?   I'm leaning toward option 3,  but all the options are a considerable amount of work (9 permutations times 100 reference use cases), so I'd like to avoid false starts/blind alleys.

Thanks in advance for any insight you may have.

Bob

9

General Board / Linked Document Editor window size

« on: February 04, 2008, 03:25:42 pm »

Does anyone know how/whether the Linked Document Editor window can be re-sized ?   I end up with a usable window about 1/4 of my screen height/width and can't seem to locate any method to make it any larger.

10

General Board / Re: Completely new and completely lost

« on: July 23, 2007, 08:59:49 am »

My 2 cents:

UML 2 and the Unified Process: Practical Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (2nd Edition) (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series) (Paperback)
by Jim Arlow (Author), Ila Neustadt (Author)

Eminently readable and instructive in both the "How" and "Why" contexts.

11

General Board / Re: sysML beta and production 6.5 issues

« on: September 07, 2006, 01:40:43 pm »

I knew SysML is an added cost product, but it has not yet been released for sale, hence my expectation that the beta would still operate.

I had a copy of beta2 installation stored locally so I didn't know the links were questionable.

12

General Board / sysML beta and production 6.5 issues

« on: September 07, 2006, 11:07:16 am »

my sysML beta 2 is not functioning with the new 6.5 (build 797)release.  Complains about not being licensed even after uninstall/reinstall.



Anyone else seeing this behavior ?

Interestingly enough, I can open an already saved model which contains sysML and it (generally anyway) seems to work.  Just can't add it to an EAP that doesn't already have it......

13

General Board / Re: Actrionscript, Python and SQL in one project ?

« on: August 22, 2006, 12:09:02 pm »

Did you have to write a transformation template for Python ?  I don't seem to be able to define a new one in the UI - the help files suggested a path of making sure it was available in the Code Gen templates (it was) and iterating over the types to make sure the bits are flipped to Modified Yes (via Edit Save with no changes)

(probably "pilot error" but I'm a bit lost on this...)

14

General Board / Problem with Code Generation in Python

« on: October 25, 2005, 01:07:43 pm »

(likely pilot error, but here goes anyway)

I've got a hierarchy of classes defined.  Every one of them has Python as the individual class "Language" and the default language for code generation is Python.

The top-level class (an abstract one) generates and the next-level down does also (some are abstract, some not at that level).  Everything below that level in the class hierarchy is coming out in Java despite the fact that the individual classes and the default are set to Python.

Any help ?

Secondary question, when code generation throws an error dialog, is there some additional logfile or debugging info I can get (ie "parse error in line 12" is not exactly helpful when the source is the class definition tabbed dialog.

Thanks in advance,

Bob

15

General Board / Re: is it me, or is there a problem with timing di

« on: February 02, 2005, 03:31:30 pm »

and/or another possible enhancement to allow the symbolic use of events where now only integer values are allowed ?