Shlaer-Mellor practitioners from all parts are converging and organizing into a community of practice. This document explores requirements for governance of the Shlaer-Mellor Commons.
The Shlaer-Mellor community ('the community') emerged late in the previous century and was largely governed within the commercial world of service providers, trainers and license-based tool vendors. The community was fragmented, regionalized and sometimes internally competitive. As the software and systems engineering worlds have embraced open source software (OSS) and worldwide collaborative and distributed development, the influence of the commercial vendors has waned. Even so, the method has continued to succeed in teams on various continents.
The availability of OSS tooling has increased during the last 10 years. And a sequence of technical conferences focusing on the practice of Shlaer-Mellor modeling has been a catalyst to the convergence of the various practitioners and service providers. There is a groundswell within the community to collaborate and promote the application of Shlaer-Mellor modeling within the engineering development world.
The time is right to formalize the relationships within the community under a clear governance of the Shlaer-Mellor Commons.
The Shlaer-Mellor Commons exists to foster a community of collaboration, camaraderie and advocacy around the method, models and tooling.
The community is steward to the Shlaer-Mellor Commons. This commons is centered around tangible and intangible common property shared within the community and accessible to the world. The common property includes but is not limited to:
-
the Shlaer-Mellor Method as documented in books, reports and as implemented in various tooling repositories of open source software (OSS) and documentation
-
model editors, compilers and runtime environments
-
repositories of models: application domains, examples, tests
-
website content
-
conference proceedings
-
training materials, videos
-
communication media: chats, forums, email lists
-
references to support and services from experts and service companies
See [dr-2] for an issue used to accumulate a list of common property.
Teams within the community provide focus on specialized aspects of Shlaer-Mellor activities. The community has been recruited and the Commons initiated by a Community Steward. The team structure is initially fluid, however a structure is emerging. Three teams provide focus on the methodology (OOA Team), tooling (RD team) and the community itself (Community Team). Each team has a leader/facilitator and is organized within itself.
more TBD
As stated above, the Shlaer-Mellor Commons exists to foster a community of collaboration, camaraderie and advocacy around the method, models and tooling. The vision for the future involves increasing the effectiveness of the collaboration, camaraderie and advocacy.
A key goal is to find and connect Shlaer-Mellor modelers from all corners. The Commons community will be the easiest, most efficient and enjoyable means of collaborating with fellow modelers. Existing and new practitoners will find the people they need and the tools to work together.
When people search for 'Shlaer-Mellor', 'xUML/xtUML', 'executable modeling' or 'modeling and translation', they will find the Shlaer-Mellor Commons. They will find colleagues. They will find tools to engage with these colleagues efficiently and pleasantly.
Since the Commons is largely an Open Source Software collaboration, users will find all of the tools and ways of working expected for open source projects. They will find issue trackers, source code repositories and commmunication channels that are best present practices in the online engineering development world.
Shlaer-Mellor Commons members are a distinct group with distinct interests. Shlaer-Mellor people share some ways of thinking and enjoy sharing time with others who value precise modeling, execution and translation. People will find opportunities to enjoy time together through online communications channels, work opportunities, conferences, training materials and articles of interest.
Conferences and physical gatherings will be arranged and promoted through the Commons communication channels giving members the opportunity to enjoy working and relaxing together.
The Shlaer-Mellor Commons promotes a particular process of systems analysis and design, because it is seen to be effective and even a Better Way in many situations. Therefore, practitioners desire to see the community grow and see the Method applied more widely. Members of the Shlaer-Mellor Commons promote involvement and growth.
So, with the above stated, what might this look like?
-
coalescence of the various Shlaer-Mellor related groups (PT, KC, MI/R, xtUML, xUML, OOA, etc.) linked from the more general Shlaer-Mellor Commons
-
continuous, incremental refinement of the Method by an OOA Council
-
an easy-to-read map of the various dialects and literature describing them
-
an easy-to-read map of the available tooling with features and user bases described to help choose a modeling tool to use (or to help develop)
-
shlaermellor.org as a landing site with links to the collaboration utilities
-
a Slack chat with rooms and threads for the various interest groups
-
more material accessible without the need to register user IDs on multiple sites
-
textual as well as graphical modeling tools
-
text to graphics and graphics to text conversions
-
more and better model compilers
-
more and better model execution and debug environments
-
a base Shlaer-Mellor metamodel with paths to derive and extend it
-
a growing annual online conference
-
physical gatherings each year on at least 4 continents
-
an organized and growing base of teaching and training materials
-
representation in related activities like ET-Robocon and other modeling contests
The roadmap is simply the realization of the vision. With a roadmap, the vision can be "project managed" into reality a step at a time. While it is nice to have a grand vision, it is also wise to be realistic in terms of involvement in voluntary activities like the Commons. Therefore, with a vision, a roadmap and modest expectations, the Shlaer-Mellor community can celebrate incremental steps along the roadmap.
The Shlaer-Mellor Commons is composed of shared property as outlined above. This property is largely Open Source Software (OSS) and documentation. Thus, material participation is accomplished in the "Open Source Way". The Commons attempts to utilize best practices established by other successful communities and bodies of shared IP. Projects such as Linux, Apache and WordPress have sustainably engaged users, developers and advocates over the years.
Central to open source projects are the following: issue tracking, source code management and communication channels. Participation in the community means connecting through the currently established issue trackers, source code repositories and communication channels. Thus, the first step for any participant is to mechanically connect to these three fundamental elements.
The mechanics of this participation infrastructure will start with available resources and grow and improve over time according to the Roadmap.
Successful open source projects track issues. An issue can be a question, bug report or feature request. What is critical is that issues are captured, identified and progressed through a lifecycle. This will look like engineering development.
[dr-3] is a link to the initial issue tracker being used by the Shlaer-Mellor Commons. To use the tracker, it is necessary to register a user ID.
Open source projects maintain repositories of source code and documentation in version control systems. These repositories enable changes and additions to be made to the body of knowledge incrementally, methodically and safely. Changes in the source body are linked to issues in the issue tracker.
The Shlaer-Mellor Commons manages a composition of source code repositories associated with the various sources of tooling and documentation. Google Docs and git repositories will be common for the foreseeable future. Other collaboration environments are likely to be added.
Active and successful participants will become comfortable collaborating on shared documents which are version controlled. Participants involved in source code (models and tooling) will become comfortable forking, branching, merging and submitting pull requests to these various source repositories.
[dr-4] is a link to the xtuml source repositories on GitHub.
Communication is the foundation of community. The Shlaer-Mellor Commons is an online community and uses internet-based communication channels such as email, chat rooms and social media. Successful participants will join the various channels. These channels and their appropriate use is constantly evolving along with rest of the internet culture. The Linux community started in a Usenet newsgroup and has migrated and adapted as different media became available and popularized. The S-M Commons will do the same.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 License
On 2 of the 3 issues at hand, I believe the PT position also captures the initial OOA as regards event prioritization and polymorphic events (OOA 96). WRT association formalization, I would need to research a bit further. My sense is that the original OOA assumed that associations were formalized as a matter of course. I doubt I will find the word 'mandatory' or 'optional', but I will look. All known tooling required formalization perhaps for a variety of non-Method issues.
WRT event polymorphism, we do have a syntactic and semantic divergence that I am keen to learn the origins of and discuss the recommendations going forward. Colin has suggested a fairly practical Way Forward, and I will probably agree. However, I will enjoy learning:
1) How did we manage to get these 2 different interpretations? 2) Is one of the interpretations more correct? (true to what Stephen and Sally had in mind) 3) Is one of the interpretations better? (more powerful and generally useful)