This is actually the 50th post to the Formal Mind blog. A reason to celebrate, but also a reason to reflect. The goal of this blog is to inform our readers on science in systems engineering.  Are we doing a good job?

To find out, we created a short one-page survey on the content of this blog.  In particular, we have a lot of readers in Germany, so we’d like to hear from you whether it is worth the while to offer a German translation of the blog articles.

Filling out this anonymous survey should take less than five minutes, so:

Please help us and fill out this short one-page survey

Do you have colleagues or friends concerned with systems engineering, who may be interested in our blog? If so, please spread the word and forward this message to them.

ReConf: Visualisierung von Anforderungen (English)

Für unsere deutschen Leser gibt es eine Zusammenfassung des Vortrags “Visualisierung von Anforderungen”, den Michael Jastram im Wissenschaftstrack der ReConf vortragen wird.  Dieser ist als Gastbeitrag im Blog von Andrea Herrmann veröffentlicht worden.

Die ReConf findet vom 16.-19. März 2015 in München statt.  Wir würden uns freuen, Sie an unserem Stand begrüßen zu dürfen.

Eclipse RMF Release 0.12.0 coming up

Good news for those users who consume the Eclipse sources directly. The official release of 0.12.0 is planned for mid March 2015.

Our own distribution, formalmind Studio, is based on a snapshot of the development sources.  Therefore, the features described here have been available to Studio users for a while now.  For the rest, here is a summary of the improvements since the last version (warning – this is rather technical):

• The documentation has been migrated from the Wiki to a separate repository, providing more flexibility and better quality.
• The infrastructure for context-sensitive help in dialogs has been created and some help content provided.
• Several features from the ProStep ReqIF Implementor Guide have been implemented, including:
  • Color-coding attributes with the prefix “ReqIf.”.
  • Support of Conversation ID in Tool Extensions.
• Last-Change attribute is now properly maintained.
• Search and Replace features:
  • Implementation of search infrastructure.
  • Basic dialog for composing search (and replace) queries.
  • User-friendly search dialog.
  • Quicksearch (search-as-you-type).
• Dealing with large cells in AgileGrid.
• Providing a “unified column” to improve the look from Specifications from DOORS.
• Ensuring compatibility for Eclipse 3.8 – 4.4 (this applies to the RMF update site)
• Improving rendering of HTML view (now includes images from XHTML).
• Several Bug Fixes (Bugzilla query).
• Better renderers and editors (e.g. for date fields and enumerations).
• Roughly doubled unit test coverage (to ~900 automated tests).
• Improved separation of core and front end, in particular with respect to the registration of factories and ItemProviders.

We hope that you find these improvements useful.

 Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net