Month: June 2018

Helemaal niks in 020

People who know me will recognize the title at least partly. Because I was born in the best city of the Netherlands, Rotterdam, I will never pronounce the name of our capital. That city becoming capital is a capital mistake… (pun intended)
The Dutch government houses in The Hague, a beautiful city at the coast of the Northsea, so it would be logically that The Hague (Or ‘s Gravenhage as the official name is) should be the capital. Nobody really understand why it isn’t.
The rivalry between Rotterdam (010 btw) and 020 is of course very football related. “Helemaal niks in 020” is “Totally nothing in 020”. We in Rotterdam sing that if the 020 football team has another year without a prize. The 020 “fans” still think they are the best.
But OK, it is our capital and we have to live with it. And sometimes I have to visit it (I even worked there for 7 years…) since I had guests from the United States and they all want to visit that.

Tourists

So I organized that a friend of mine who happens to live here, the poor guy, would guide us around in the city. And we do that the tourist way. A walk through the center of the city and the same but then by boat. I can really recommend doning that, it’s really cool, admitted. A few visits to a terrace and a few beers. And of course to the Hard Rock Cafe. NO!!!, I did not buy a t-shirt. I will not wear that. The only HRC shirt I don’t have and never will have.

Any Rhapsody news?

Yes!! 8.3.1 is on the way, I have a beta version installed already, looks cool! AUTOSAR 4.3.1 is supported and what I like very much is the new bridges. Rhapsody can now, finally, create a small bridge in the diagram when two lines cross. Simple change but looks way better. The double click to enter stamp mode in a diagram is also really cool and saves you time when creating diagrams with a lot of similar elements. The quick navigation improved so you can switch to diagrams with a single click on an element.
The API is improved, you wil not notice that much but the use is now in line with the Microsoft guidelines. There is now support for Visual Studio 2017 and.. there is a setting to let Rhapsody save in the old file format by default.
We are going to thoroughly test the new Rhapsody and I keep you informed when we release this version to all of our customers.

That’s it! Happy modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden ( wvdheiden@willert.de )

It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it…

Sometimes life is good, sometimes life is awesome. I had a busy week, hence the limited BLOG entries, but during this week I had time to travel to 020 (That’s how I call the city that became our capital by a “capital” mistake see: 020 and 8.3.1)
Then why go there? Well there is a place called Ziggodome where lots of concerts take place, On Wednesday it was the time of Pearl Jam, one of the bands I love.
Their first album “10” was one I played over and over and I still do that.

When I saw they were performing in the Netherlands I was sitting behind my computer at the start of the sale to get tickets. Unfortunately I could only get 2 tickets… Better than nothing I thought…

Unfortunately I also noticed that I had visitors from the US in that week that I could not shift. So I was already thinking of selling my tickets but when I told my guests that they all shouted: “Can you get more tickets”? Yes I can… 😉

So I traveled from the office in Bückeburg to “Nul Twintig” together with my American friends. A nice drive, about 350 kilometers. We ate a burger at the Burger B*tch (Not kidding, that is the real name, just google it) drank a beer and attended the awesome concert. Life is good.

What does this all have to do with Rhapsody? Nothing directly… but my friends are also Rhapsody and modeling people. Not only that, there were 2 Automotive Spice experts and another AUTOSAR expert. So we used all traveling time very useful with some interesting discussions on how to do ASpice with Rhapsody, how to import and export Rhapsody UML information to and from ARXML, how to do a model transformation from SysML to AUTOSAR and back with traceability links. We only stopped discussion when Eddy Vedder was singing. That was just too good. Love Rhapsody but I also love Pearl Jam.

So. Happy modeling with Rhapsody. one is Alive in Even Flow….

Walter van der Heiden ( wvdheiden@willert.de )

Introduction

As every year we have organized our MESCONF (Modeling of Embedded Systems CONFerence) We changed the format a little bit, this year we have extended it to 2 days, the first day is just like last year with the difference that we have an evening session, the second day is “Tool Vendor Day” to allow Tool vendors to do a more marketing focussed presentation of their tools

Again at the fantastic Infineon location in Munich we had 80 people there listening to various presentations of experts and later some Open Space sessions.

The evening session with Nicolas Dierks the Philosopher was really interesting and shines a new light on our lives as developers.

As usual we used “Open Space” to organize a big part of the MESCONF. Proven concept, since years we receive very good critics about it.

We spoke about lots of things that occupy modelers these days. One thing that returned in many meetings was the topic of “How to handle people who are refusing to model.”
A very interesting topic. Why are people refusing to model?

• Some people just don’t get familiarized with modeling. Modeling is not easy, you need a lot of initial knowledge to apply it in the correct way. The only thing that helps there is train, train, train, coach..
• Modeling is different from programming. Sometimes people who are real programming guru’s refuse to switch to modeling while they lose their “guru” status. It is difficult to discuss with them since they do not refuse consciously most of the time. they will use other arguments to refuse modeling and keep on doing what they do.
• “Known hurts are better than unknown happiness”. A common attitude of most people is to stick to what they know until the hurt is really, really big. As long as people manage somehow to deliver their products using old methods they will stick to them.
• “We don’t have time to repair the fence, we are busy catching chickens”. Most people are under stress and continue doing what they do because the stress does not allow them to step back and take the time to evaluate the used methods.

There is no “silver bullet” solution to that. The common feeling is that the world is leaning more and more towards modeling, partly because younger developers have less objections against it (Mostly they had it in school) and because the complexity is increasing faster. We also notice an increase in Rhapsody business. And that’s good!

OK, that’s it. Happy modeling with Rhapsody

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)