xtUML 2015 is history and hereby declared an overwhelming success. Many thanks to those who made it a surprisingly productive event!
The first surprise was the community reception of an xtUML conference in North America. Engineers and Analysts from the Shlaer-Mellor community were especially pleased with the opportunity to meet, collaborate and gain hands-on experience with the latest xtUML developments. Even those who could not attend expressed satisfaction to see that Shlaer-Mellor and xtUML are alive and well in the USA and Canada (and not only Europe and Japan). Day 1 played to the Methodology crowd and covered the syntax and semantics of xtUML the Language. Community-building, collaboration and social connections continued into the evening with a well-attended dinner.
Secondly, an aggressive and risky key note presentation was arranged for the second morning involving a video communications link with two sites in Japan (Tokyo and Nagano). Three speakers, one from each site, presented. Even in these days of high technology this felt like a recipe for technical difficulty, especially considering language and time zone (14 hour difference) challenges. The speakers lectured and demonstrated Model-Driven Development (MDD) in industry and education. The presentations were brilliant, and the communication link was flawless.
Thirdly, we all got our hands dirty on Tuesday with a goal of compiling the BridgePoint tool from the source. Every conference attendee successfully forked the github repository, branched and cloned the source code onto their own (or in one case a borrowed) machine. Each developer proceeded to generate the Eclipse plugin java code from the meta-model and models of graphics and compile the result. Each participant then ran at least one unit test on the resulting build of the tool. There were tweaks that needed to be made in some environments, but the result was 100%; nobody went home without a successful build!
The summary feedback was, “Let us know when xtUML 2016 is scheduled; we plan to attend.”
Here are all the slides for the presentations.
Here is the conference program handbook for xtUML 2015.
