Trip Report - INCOSE IS 2014 Systems Engineering meets (needs) open integrations + 2025 vision

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the INCOSE International Symposium (IS) 2014, an event I've never been to before.  I've been spending more and more time over the years with Systems Engineering, it was good to learn more, share a bit more what it going on with OSLC and related topics, catch up with some friends and help some implementors lay out a plan.

One of the things that struck me as interesting is how the speakers and attendees referred to OSLC.  I'm used to seeing so many presentations over the years defining it, spelling out what the acronym means, etc.  At the IS, there was none of that.  It was just referred to by name, as everyone knows clearly what it is.  I didn't hear anyone asking or taking a note to look it up later.  OSLC was often referred to as an area which showed great promise for SE tool interoperability: as a protocol to exchange data, a way to define a minimal data model at web scale and simple ways of doing UI integration.

We had an impromptu meet up at lunch for OSLC, we in fact had too many people at the table (and yes I was the only IBMer).  It included people from PTC, Atego, JPL, Deere, Koneksys, Eclipse Foundation. Great discussion to share peoples interest, share what things are in motion and look for a way to coordinate all the activity going on in all the different places: INCOSE TII, OASIS OSLC, OMG OSLC4MBSE and more.  Looking forward to following up with this group and seeing how it advances.

I was able to give an overview and update on OSLC to an audience the represented many industries: automotive (2), air & space (2) and large machinery.

An interesting piece of work that I received when I registered what INCOSE's System's Engineering Vision for 2025, specifically these items:

• Foundations and Standards (p. 20) 
  "This systems engineering body of knowledge today is documented in a broad array of standards, handbooks, academic literature, and web-resources, focusing on a variety of domains. A concerted effort is being made to continually improve, update and further organize this body of knowledge. "
• Current Systems Engineering Practices and Challenges (p. 20-21) practice areas of "Modeling, Simulation, and Visualization", "Design Traceability by Model-Based Systems Engineering" which highlight the growing needs around improved tools and tool interoperability.
• Leveraging Technology for Systems Engineering Tools (p. 30)
  Discusses the need to move towards a set of tools that allow for: "high fidelity simulation, immersive technologies to support data visualization, semantic web technologies to support data integration, search, and reasoning, and communication technologies to support collaboration. Systems engineering tools will benefit from internet-based connectivity and knowledge representation to readily exchange information with related fields."

I'm hoping to make it to Boston around September 10th to run an OSLC workshop for the INCOSE community, stay tuned.

Rational User Conference (aka IBM Innovate) Take #10

Last week I attended my 10th (yes I said one-zero or tenth) Rational User Conference (aka IBM Innovate, aka Rational Software Developer User Conference, aka Rational Software Conference).  It is also the 5th time I have attended while talking about OSLC.  Hard to believe that Mik Kersten and myself did the first ever OSLC presentation back in 2009.  It has been interesting to be part of the transition from people hearing "O S L C" and having no idea, to today where most attendees not only know what it is, they are actively working to build integrations using OSLC, encouraging their other tool suppliers to support it and active in various OSLC activities such as specification working groups or general community promotion.   I has transitioned from an unknown new concept, to the way we do integrations.  By "we", I'm not just talking about Rational, I'm talking about attendees there that were talking how how they are using OSLC such as Airbus, NEC, ...

Though, still many people have a hard time saying or spelling OSLC right (it is a tough one)...most commonly is OSCL.  If only we pushed to rename it back in 2010 to something like I proposed as SLIC, that would have been...well "slick".  I digress.

This year, I arrived a couple days before the official conference started as it was a good opportunity for those of us very active in OSLC to get together for some face-to-face discussions on OSLC strategy.  This was spearheaded by the Steering Committee (SC).  Out of these early discussions (which have been a continuation of ongoing thoughts by the community and SC), came the idea of an organizing and higher-level concept of "Integration Patterns".  I threw together a page to articulate the thoughts, propose a way forward and start to gather interest.  This was discussed at couple other times during the week, such as the OSLC SC discussion at the Wednesday's Birds of a Feather session, which was well received from the attendees.

Sunday afternoon held the Open Technology Summit, where various leaders in open technologies shared how various efforts have help drive business efficiencies and improve overall time and quality of delivery around such things as: OpenStack, OSLC, CloudFoundry, Apache Cordova, ...

I led a panel discussion titled "Best practices on implementing integrated tools" with panelist with a wide and vast set of experience (I hope to share the recording once I receive it)

Innovate2014 Panel - Best Practices on Implementing Integrations from Steve Speicher

After 5 years, Mik and I were reunited as we talked about "Lifecycle Tool Integration through Open Interfaces" (though Mik and I have been talking/collaborating this whole time, it wasn't like a band breakup and then reunion)

Innovate2014 Better Integrations Through Open Interfaces from Steve Speicher

There were many other great conversations, learning how customers are looking to build out their own OSLC implementations by either evolving their own in house tools or looking to build adapters for 3rd party tools.  The demand continues to grow and look forward to continue to helping them succeed by making their integrations happen.

As with many of these conferences, especially ones that you've gone to 10 times, it is great to catch up with many good friends I've made over the years.  Now on to make sure we continue to deliver value and have some cool things to show and talk about next year (oh and at next week's EclipseCon France event and end of June's INCOSE conference).

Trip Report - OSLC Connect @ ALM Forum in Seattle March 30 - April 4

I recently attended an event in Seattle called ALM Forum, used to go by a slightly different name and purpose in past years (ALM Summit).

Quick Summary

Overall I thought it was well worth the time and would recommend going back next year.  Since my primary purpose for being there was to promote OSLC and get a better understanding of adoption problems.  So I think we covered those fairly well.

Event by Event Summary

I had to opportunity to attend many of the sessions and events, I'll touch on a majority of them but some with less significant information to share I probably just omitted for brevity.

Monday

Spent most of the day meeting up with some customers and OSLC advocates.

OASIS OSLC Booth in Exhibit Hall

Booth setup, this was a first.  It was a good opportunity for the OASIS OSLC Member Section to leverage funds from OASIS membership to contribute to sponsorship of the event and have this booth in the exhibit hall.  When we could, Sean Kennedy and I would staff the booth.

OSLC Happy Hour

This was a good social event Monday evening which we had about 10% of the conference attendees (not bad) attend.  Collected some information via some surveys, met some new people, finally me some face-to-face and many good conversations on issues and successes with integrations.

#integration #HappyHour @ALMForum - join us at Fountain Wine Bar w/ @DavidJWest & @sspeiche pic.twitter.com/xW7mRMpSM8
— Sean Kennedy (@seanpk8) March 31, 2014

Tuesday

Breakout Session: Better Integrations through Open Interfaces

This was my session on the Integration track, which had good attendance.

Better integrations through open interfaces from Steve Speicher

Wednesday

ALM for the Internet of Things by Ravit Danino (Director, Applications Product Management HP Software & Solutions)

Ravit gave a good overview of the key challenges and opportunities for ALM and PLM tool integrations, highlighting needs for standards-based integration between vast set of tools and suppliers that will be used.

Thursday

PROMCODE: An Open Platform for Large-Scale Contracted Software Delivery in Software Supply Chains - Mikio Aoyama

Professor Aoyama gave an excellent presentation on the challenges of large-scale efforts and how OSLC is being used to combat those challenges.

Lightning Sessions

Challenges and Opportunities in ALM-PLM integration - Michael Azoff

Michael touched on large opportunity for ALM-PLM integrations, seeing that there is still a large gap between the disciplines.  He also observed that OSLC was the place where many PLM vendors were turning towards solving some of the integration challenges and spoke of the positive outlook there.

Integration Principles and Reality - Ludmila Ohlsson

Ludmilla summarized their work at Ericsson and the vision around open standards-based integrations based on leading standards such as OSLC and how to broaden the adoption to more tools.

Trip Report from EclipseCon 2013

I had a chance, along with Michael Fiedler,  to attend the US EclipseCon 2013 in Boston, MA in late March.   In addition to presenting a BOF and a session on OSLC, Linked Data and Lyo, we were able to attend several sessions, panel discussions and BOFs.   It was also a great chance to meet with members of the OSLC and Lyo communities to discuss the challenges of tool integration.

General Impressions from the Conference

It was cool to see and hear OSLC and Eclipse Lyo in a variety of sessions.  There were good active discussions with the Eclipse Mylyn team regarding their recent m4 proposal, including how OSLC and Lyo play a key part.  It was good to explore ways we could work together with Mylyn, Orion, Hudson and more.  We did do a lot of education and exploration with a number of attendees that had no or limited knowledge of what was going on within OSLC and Lyo.  Various panels, keynotes and sessions often called out the need for tool vendors to be able to collaborate on open interfaces....we asked them: "have you heard of OSLC?"  There were a number of people making the case for OSLC-based integrations very easy.

Here is a summary of the two sessions we presented at EclipseCon:

1) Lifecycle Tool Integrations: Linked Data, OSLC and Eclipse Lyo
Session type: Birds of a Feather

The participants ranged from experienced OSLC implementers interested in contributing to Eclipse Lyo to those new to OSLC looking for learning resources. 

The discussion covered the re-vamped tutorial on open-services.net, using the Lyo OSLC4J Bugzilla adapter as a learning resource and some general OSLC and linked data integration philosophies.  Topics included:

• a description of an OSLC4J implementation in progress which exposes EMF Models as OSLC resources - being considered for contribution to Lyo
• the experiences of a developer who has implemented several OSLC integrations to enable tools to participate in an ALM system
• The OSLC CM 1.0 integrations developed for the Mantis bug tracker and FusionForge
• Status of Eclipse Lyo - what is new in 1.1 and what is coming
• One OSLC implementer strongly recommended developing integrations using 2.0 of OSLC.  He also pointed out authentication is a primary painpoint for the work he has done.

2) Leveraging W3C Linked Data, OSLC, and Open Source for Loosely Coupled Application Integrations
Session type: ALM Connect track

EclipseCon 2013 Learn and share about integrations using Eclipse Lyo, OSLC and Linked Data from sspeiche

This session was a 35 minute tour through tool integration, problems with previous approaches and new approaches using linked data and OSLC.

This was followed by an overview of open source projects relevant to this space (Jena, Wink, Clerezza, Lyo etc) and a brief demo of some potential integrations between Eclipse Orion and a Change Management tool (Bugzilla) and an Automation tool (Lyo automation reference implementation).   

There was very little time left for questions at the end, but there were some good ones which pushed the session into overtime: 

• Interest in the concept of delegated UIs and the responsibilities of the tool hosting them - described the OSLC concepts in some detail
• Interest in the concept of UI previews and compact representations.   How these resources can be used to link to full representations was described.
• Some clarifying questions were raised by a few folks about the details of the Bugzilla integration demonstrated.   Explained it is the live Eclipse Bugzilla instance, but that it could have been any OSLC CM provider.

Special thanks to Michael Fiedler for both authoring some of this content of this blog post, as well as building the demo, presenting and too many things to list here.