Planet SCM

One question that came up at the conference was "who needs to ALF-enable their tools?" I'd like to use this blog to find out. If you have some suggestions about tools that should be ALF-enabled please let me know what they are. I will post the list on the ALF web-site and keep some kind of tally going.

Thanks.

Kevin

It has been a whirlwind four weeks for ALF. First the extended trip to Asia and the UK and then to arrive back in the US in time for a full-court press at EclipseCon. Not only that but a surrogate ALF has been delivering the message in Poland to wild reviews. Before we get to that lets have a quick update on where we are.

RedMonk: Met with a very interesting and insightful analyst from RedMonk in London just over a week ago. We had lunch at a super restaurant in the City called Bread and Wine. The conversation was pretty wide ranging but was full of validation that ALF is an idea whose time has come. James Governor, the aforementioned interesting and insightful analyst, had been talking about this problem for the past few years and thought that his words were falling on stony ground. He was, as you can imagine, thrilled to hear that ALF was not only solving the problem but that the ecosystem was building nicely to make it happen quickly. He talks about this encounter in his PodCast available from RedMonk Radio: the bit on ALF is about 6 minutes into the pod cast. Makes good listening.

EclipseCon: This is the biggest Eclipse event of the year and this year was a bumper year with insiders telling me that Eclipse stopped recruiting attendees when registrations passed 1450. Serena were there in force with all the key ALF contributors and commiters talking about ALF. We spent the entire one and a half days of the Exhibition recruiting vendors and contributors to the ecosystem and putting gentle pressure on the big names (they know who they are) to support the project. What was really rewarding is the impact ALF made on the conference with several keynotes singling ALF out for a mention. "ALF is an important project for the future growth of the Eclipse ecosystem," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse Foundation. "ALF builds on the promise of the Eclipse platform for tools integration and provides an open source infrastructure for collaboration and interoperability between development tools across the entire lifecycle." Carl Zetie's comment (leading industry analyst with Forrester) even suggested that ALF was going to be the most interesting project this year and Corona (see later in the blog) the most interesting next year.

New ALF Supporters: Just before the show started we were able to report that 4 new vendors had signed up to help with the project and to ALF-enable their technologies. These vendors are IVIS, PlanView, ViewTier and Active-Endpoints whose BPEL-engine is such a critical part of the ALF POC Demo.

ALF POC Demo: EclipseCon was the first time that the ALF Proof of Concept Demo was shown to the community as a whole. We had a large group attending the demo and got some very interesting questions. Since the demo was published on the ALF part of the Eclipse web site we've been getting really good feedback about it (and through this blog too - for which many thanks) and the most consistent amongst the comments has been "how about showing some Open Source tools being orchestrated". So that is what we have done: in the new demo (which you can see on the ALF Site) we have included using Subversion and CVS as alternate source control systems. We have also extended the demo to include more information on how you would configure ALF and modify the Events and Service Flows. If you have any thoughts about the demo, as always please let us know.

ALF and Corona: The big news from Compuware about the creation of the Corona project caused a lot of interest because of the close alignment of ALF and Corona solving different parts of the tool interoperability problem. There were some in the press who tried to cause some controversy around this but what they didn't know is that Serena and Compuware have been in discussions for the past several months making sure the two technologies are completely complementary. "Eclipse is on the mark having separate ALM projects", said Carey Schwaber, an analyst at Forrester Research. "I think they do need to be two separate [projects]," she said. "There's clear synergies; there's no question." Whereas ALF is about coarsely grained workflow integration and how tools interact with one another, Corona is centered on how code assets interrelate, such as how source code on a mainframe could connect with code on a distributed platform, Schwaber said.

Poland: A close colleague called Pawel Pilarczyk recently was talking about ALF at a conference in Poland. He writes "Thank you for your input for my ALF presentation. I have just finished it. I had 100+ attendees and I met with a great applause: this is a Holy Grail everybody is waiting for! When I asked "who is using Eclipse" more that 50% raised their hands." Just before he spoke a well known vendor presented their latest toolset and mentioned how many (50) integrations they had. At the end of the Pawel's ALF presentation the audience members were asking the well know vendor "when are you going to ALF-enable your tool?"

Agile Journal: If you haven't seen the regular article in Agile Journal check it out. It is a really good publication with some interesting insights and looks like becoming a must-read for anyone trying rise above the Babel and get some sound guidance on what is really going on. I am working on the next edition which is entitled "Stretched to the limit" and talks about how, in this Flat World where space and time are no longer constraints, technology is the vital link that holds it all together. If you have thoughts and experiences I'd love to hear them and, with your permission, use them in my next article. Let me know directly if you have any by mailing me at kparker@serena.com

ALM Expo: This wonderful event is just around the corner. ALF is going to feature there in one of the keynote presentations. This unique event has the same format as a regular conference except everything happens in cyberspace including the exhibition floor. Its very cool! If you get a chance sign up and attend.

All for now

Kevin

So apologies first: ALF has been on the road for the last two weeks in Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi and I am finally getting a little time now to update the blog from here in the UK. I'll be back in the US next week in time for EclipseCon.

We did 60 hours of meetings and presentations and stashed quite a few air-miles. Part of the reason for the trip to Asia was to spread the word about ALF but it was mostly about seeing if there were distinct differences between the needs of the Asian market and the Western market. As far as tool interoperability is concerned, and the problem that ALF solves, the customers uniformly welcomed the initiative and, like their Western counterparts, thought that this was an idea whose time had come.

Uniquely, in the Indian market, the major out-sourcers and off-shorers commented that one of their most common problems was as a result of having to adopt the client's infrastructure tool stack. Often these tools are point solutions and not well integrated which impedes their ability to deliver quality solutions in a timely manner. Often the client's infrastructure is incomplete and the out-sourcer has to provide complementary additional tools that plug into the clients'. Whenever these situations occur the integration effort can be extensive and complex. With so many contracts these days being fixed price any additional costs setting up the infrastructure eat significantly into the profits. So, for the out-sourcers, a nascent technology solution like ALF is a very interesting proposition.

Another interesting trend, that several Indian out-sourcers talked about, was the beginning of an independent software development industry, developing general tools to be sold on the open market. Like vendors everywhere the cost of entry, making your new tool integrate with all the leading technologies out there, can be significant and again these new vendors see ALF as a great way of leveling the playing-field.

Kevin

We have just posted a new version of the demo. It's a little more polished and shows all aspects of the Proof of Cencept code.

It also offers the choice of just seeing the demo or a version with a pre-amble and post-amble to give the demo more context.

We are working on how we can use some Open Source tools in the demo for EclipseCon and will start to show the ALF Eclipse plug-ins once they are in a worknig state.

Kevin

If you have an ALF related blog please let me know and please link your blog to this one.

Kevin

We had a superb meeting yesterday with many of the ALF contributors and committer and even some of our consumers.

The highlight of the meeting was a full on demo of the Proof of Concept code which was delivered by Tim Buss. After the demo there was a lot of feedback on how the demo can be improved and Tim and Ali have agreed to go back and incorporate that feedback. We are putting up the early version of the demo so that you can give your feedback. We also got approval from each of the partner companies to be able to show there products through the demo.

One very interesting idea that we will try to implement before EclipseCon is the orchestration of some Open Source tools into the demo like Bugzilla and CVS.

The rest of the meeting was very effective too. We looked at the plans for the deliverables needed to complete the project for version 1.0 which is expected to be in October. Ali Kheirolomoom led a discussion goals and objectives that need to be completed including the special needs for Security and Single Sign On which are going to be critical components in the final design.

We also too a deep look into the Vocabulary Groups and Steve Taylor made an excellent presentation on how these groups should be organized. Brian Carroll laid out the detailed deliverables that the Vocabulary Groups will need to produce for the project's success. As the debate embedded and flowed it became apparent that the best approach to teasing out the vocabularies, and the way that would avoid most conflict, would be to use Use Cases as the driving force that validates the vocabularies.

At the end of the meeting we had a roundtable discussion with Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Ward Cunningham from the Eclipse Foundation and they gave us some very good advice about how to improve our communications and transparency on the project.

We had a good discussion about EclipseCon and agreed that we would try to secure 3 Demo Slots and a Poster session at the conference to give the broadest opportunity to show the efficacy of the ALF solution which in turn should build the ecosystem and attract further contributors to the project.

All the presentations and documents have been posted on the ALF site and so has the Flash Demo.

Kevin

At the last meeting of the Architecture team Tim Buss ran through the demo of the ALF Proof of Concept code. It looks great and was good to see everyone's work coordinated! It demos so well.

He also showed us parts of the presentation that is an introduction to the demo and folks are interested in having this to show internally at their own organizations. We're going to polish it this week and make it available.

Once we get approval from all the contributors to show their stuff in public we'll make it available on the web site.

Kevin

Well it is a very big day today for the project. We have passed legal review, we have passed our own internal technical review and we posted the code into the CVS repository this morning.

Brian Carroll, who leads the architecture team for the project, posted this news on the newsgroup today.

Kevin

Dear ALF community,

I am pleased to announce that the source code for the version of the ALF Event Manager to be used for the ALF Proof-of-Concept (POC) is now available in the ALF CVS repository.

Details and notes:
1. The process followed the Eclipse procedure for code contributions that were not "developed in the Eclipse CVS". First, I submitted an Eclipse code Contribution Questionnaire for the ALF Event Manager on January 23rd. After interacting with Janet Campbell, Manager of Intellectual Property for the Eclipse Foundation, the code was reviewed for IP and accepted by Eclipse for check-in to CVS. I then checked the code into CVS late today (Feb 1st).

2. The code is in the Eclipse repository with the following properties:
Connection type: extssh
Host: dev.eclipse.org
Repository path: /home/technology
Archive location: HEAD / org.eclipse.alf
Component: eventmgr
Sub component (i.e. package): org.eclipse.alf.eventManager

3. The corresponding IP log is in the same repository, under Component:
releaseReviews, Sub component: Feb2006

4. An excerpt from the code contribution questionnaire (with personal info excluded) is shown below:
Submitter:
Name: Brian Carroll
Organization: Serena
E-mail: bcarroll@serena.com

Committer
Name: same

PMC
PMC Name: Bjorn Freeman-Benson

Contribution
Project: Technology
Subproject: Application Lifecycle Framework
Component: Event Manager

Name: ALF EventManager (POC Version)
Version: POC (Proof of Concept) version
Size: 1800
Description: The ALF Event Manager is the component of the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework project that receives events from participating tools and applications, examines those events, and dispatches the appropriate ALF ServiceFlow (i.e. BPEL-defined process) to handle the event.
All communication uses Web Services, including the raising of the Events and the dispatching of the ServiceFlow

Pre-existing Packages: Yes. The intention is for users to download those packages themselves. [Those 3rd party packages are not part of the contribution.]

I coordinated and personally conducted the reviews of the code for quality, origin of the code, and intellectual property rights prior to authorizing this contribution, and have approved these 15 modules of the ALF EventManager (POC version) for contribution to Eclipse.

Contributor
Name: Manny Panis
Organization: Serena Software

Contribution Percentage: 100
Other Contributors: Manny Panis wrote 100% of the code, using as a guide the design specified in the ALF Architecture document published on the Eclipse ALF website.
Brian Carroll (Serena, bcarroll@serena.com) and Tim Buss (Serena, tbuss@serena.com wrote that Architecture document and consulted with Manny while he was writing the code.

Cryptography: Not applicable.

4. Special note about the code: The EventManager code is a Java Servlet.
The initial version is intended to be compiled using the Servlet 2.3 libraries as it uses the SingleThreadModel which has been deprecated in Servlet 2.4 libraries. Visual code inspections suggests the ALF Event Manager is multithreaded, but conservatively we have used the SingleThreadModel marker interface until sufficient load testing indicates it is multithreaded, at which time we will remove that marker.
The code that is checked in is the same as is used in the ALF POC integration work that Tim Buss is conducting with the ALF partner community.

Please download and review the code.

Regards,
Brian

As you know I am not one to splurge the superlatives but ... today I watch an early demo of the ALF Proof of Concept code being put through it's paces it was great. I am looking forward to being able to show off the code at EclipseCon in March when the demo will be fully ready for prime time.

Now that the demo is ready to go we are holding an ALF Team Meeting, face-to-face, on February 16th and inviting all the contributors to see the code in action. We have also invited Bjorn Freeman-Benson from the Eclipse Management Organization to attend and see the project's progress to date.


Date: Thursday 16th February 2006

Location: Pebble Beach Conference Room
Serena Software HQ
2755 Campus Drive
San Mateo CA 94403

Dial-in: +1-303-928-3232 id 1602349#

WebEx: To be determined later

Agenda:

Morning:
08:00 Breakfast

09:00 Welcome and introductions (Kevin Parker)

09:15 State of the Project (Ali Kheirolomoom)
Accomplishments (Ali Kheirolomoom)
Review of the POC Demo (Tim Buss)
Mind Share Successes (Kevin Parker)

10:00 Break

10:30 Next Phase (Ali Kheirolomoom)
Project Direction (Ali Kheirolomoom)
Vertical Vocabulary Groups (Brian Carroll)
Changes to the Use Cases (Kelly Shaw)
Repository/Bug Tracking Practices (Brian Carroll)

11:30 EclipseCon (Kevin Parker)
Extensions to POC Demo (Ali Kheirolomoom)
Analyst & Press Meetings (Kevin Parker)

12:00 Lunch with Bjorn Freemen-Benson

13:00 Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework Project Demonstration (Tim Buss)
Q&A;

14:30 Eclipse Technology Update Q&A; (Bjorn Freeman-Benson)

15:00 Close

RSVP to me if you are going to attend in person.

Kevin

What a great start to the week! This morning' s press release from AccuRev reported in ComputerWorld reports their intention to support ALF and enable their tools to the project. As they say in the release:

"Having recently joined the Eclipse Foundation for open source developer tools, AccuRev also is participating in the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework project. This effort focuses on developing a standardized set of Web services for integrating IDEs, requirements management tools, software configuration management tools, and testing tools.

"The Eclipse effort eventually will supercede AccuRev's AccuBridge technology for use in Eclipse environments."

It's great to have them on board.

Kevin

The core ALF team met today to determine the groupings of Vertical Vocabularies that need to be defined in order to create a sparse set of the most common objects, attributes, domains and events that are found in the Application Lifecycle Management arena.

We selected, as the first pass, the following list:

· Security Management
· Identity Management
· Project Portfolio Management
· Customer Relationship Management
· Service Desk/Help Desk Management
· Issue Management (also Issue and Defect Tracking)
· Operational Process Management (also Request Management)
· Project Management
· Requirements Management
· Prototyping and Application Visualization
· Modeling
· Configuration Management (includes Release Management)
· Change Management
· Version Management
· Build Management
· Test Management (may also include Quality Assurance Vocabulary
· Deployment
· System Management
· Content Management

The next step is to identify and recruit vendors, open source projects, professional groups and consumers with domain expertise in these areas to come and lead the development of the vocabulary.

Other domains may be added as the project progresses.

Kevin

Yesterday I had the wonderful experience of presenting the ALF story to the Software Association of Oregon. There were about 25 members of the Portland Chapter in attendance and they seemed to think the story I was telling was very resonant with their experience.

There were some excellent questions and some thought provoking ideas: including some unique insights as to where ALF might ultimately go. There was a suggestion that ALF might become a Software Factory ultimately for the Application Lifecycle Management space.

I was given an excellent bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir for my efforts - for which, again, many thanks.

Kevin

I had a very interesting day today. I met with two software vendors who are interested in joining the ALF project.

The first meeting was with IVIS. Ivis Technologies is a leading provider of software products that enable organizations to streamline business operations and emphasize a focus on core business activities. In an increasingly competitive and evolving market place, organizations that optimize processes and make the best use of resources benefit with increased efficiency and productivity. Ivis Technologies focuses on the development of technology that enables organizations to do just that. If they decide to join the project they will be an ideal contributor bringing project management domain knowledge and insight to optimizing business processes.

The second meeting today was with JnetDirect. JNetDirect is an innovative leader in software products for improving the quality of engineered development solutions. Over 3000 companies worldwide rely on JNetDirect software to provide critical infrastructure for their applications and development environments. JNetDirect offers Java and Microsoft .Net developers a progressive suite of technology solutions for measuring, managing and maintaining code quality. They were very excited by the propect of being able to contribute to the project.

Kevin

The latest edition of SD Times has an interesting article about the Application Lifecycle Management space. In it it refer to ALF's new central role in taking ALM to the next level.

Kevin

Well I've been out of the loop for a few days in the UK. Here is a summary of the news and what's happening this week.

ALF is going to be shown off at EclipseCon in March in Santa Clara, CA. Serena is a Gold level sponsor and investing the money to showcase the Proof of Concept code. This is great opportunity for networking with other Eclipse community members and software vendors. This is where the big push for building the ecosystem will occur.

The Requirements Team's next meeting is the 25th of January - they are skipping this week. There is a new Requirements Document, just published, out there for review. Also just published are the minutes of the last Requirements meeting in the ALF Newsgroup.

The Archtecture team is meeting this week on Thursday the 19th at 11:00 PST.

The Planning team is meeting this week on Friday the 20th at 11:00 PST.

Major activities this week are further preparation for the publication of the Proof of Concept code. We have all the vendors' products installed on the VMWare image and the ALF framework code too. We are spending this week configuring and tuning the installation.

Kevin

Brian Carroll, who leads the architecture group for the ALF Project wrote to me today. He had this to say about the project.

"I know this will sound like it trivialize ALF, but I view one of ALF's most tangible benefits is The end of "cut and paste" (at least among development tools). Instead of forcing some overworked developer perform his most dreary task - cutting and pasting (or worse, retyping) data that was entered already from one tool to another (from any of: Requirements tool, Project Schedule tool, Spreadsheet, Configuration Management tool, Issue Management tool, Testing tool to any other tool from the same list).

"From a software developer's perspective, ALF will be a blessing. I suspect there is not one red-blooded developer who would rather manually retype and cut-and-paste data between tools than who would prefer to write an ALF ServiceFlow to automate the same dreaded, dreary task.

"Modern tools have certainly improved over the years, but I hate to think of the hours I have wasted retyping "Why I changed this module" into both bug tracking and configuration management systems, or cutting and pasting a list of tasks into a project scheduling tool, or taking a list of data elements in a class and a defining a corresponding table to persist or XML to expose that class. Individual tools are be more helpful today - until you need to move data from one tool to another. And for that, ALF can help.

"ALF does for cross-tool integration what macros did for single-function tools.

I can see that Brian is already waiting for the day when all of the infrastructure tools he uses are ALF enabled.

Kevin

I had an interesting insight today from Tracy Ragan at Catalyst Systems. She pointed out that the most important aspect of this project for them is that ALF represents, for the first time, true cooperation between lifecycle tools. She said "In most cases we are asked to write custom integrations between requirements tools, SCM tools and testing tools. These custom integrations are costly to the end user and require constant maintenance as new incompatible releases are installed. " She was really excited to be part of the project and looks forward to the day when ALF will change all that. "It will allow end users to choose their favorite tools without having to develop the integration between the tools. ALF has the potential to change how competing tools within the software industry perceive one another. ALF is a perfect example of how the solution is not about eliminating competition, but instead opening up the number of competing products from which an end user can choose. " This is a key benefit of the project - by levelling the playing field it will foster competition and this has to be better for the industry: both for the customers and for the vendors.

Kevin

Just before the holidays Carl Zetie wrote a compelling new report on "The Power Of Simplicity In Application Development - Practical Steps Eliminate And Prevent Complexity". In this report, which is available from Forrester Research, Carl describes how Simplicity needs to be a design force that pervades not only the architecture of our applications but should be a factor in the processes we use to develop systems and in the very tooling we select to develop those applications.

He points to the Application Lifecycle Framework's (ALF) merits of being Vendor Neutral, Externally Defined and Minimally Scoped as being important attribute's of the framework's adoption of simplicity in its design. Though he is concerned about the effect of changes in vendors tools once ALF has been implemented.

Happy New Year,

Kevin

I was recently interviewed by CIO magazine along with my colleague Boris Kaptianski whose original idea gave rise to the Application Lifecycle Project (ALF). The Podcast can be heard on http://www.cio.com/podcasts/weekinreview/weekinreview_111805.mp3 at the CIO magazine web site.

Kevin

I met with two vendors, one today and one on Friday, who both expressed general commitment to the project.

The one on Friday, a configuration management vendor, will announce their formal support for ALF in the New Year to coincide with some other announcements they'er making.

The one today needs to further discuss the project internally and wants to see the Proof Of Concept (POC) code demonstrated to them. We're setting this up for February.

Kevin