Eclipse Requirements Modeling Framework

Those familiar in the software and systems engineering domain are typically familiar with ISO/IEC 15288, a standard covering processes and life cycle stages. But it's huge, and small organizations have a hard time to justify its adaptation, for good ... [More] reasons. For those not familiar with the standard should check out  What is ISO/IEC 15288 and Why Should I Care? Before we Start: Some News Last week, we spent in Munich at ReConf 2015.  We posted our impressions in a separate article – please check it out. Also, the current issue of Eclipse Magazin (German) features the article "Entwicklung mit System: Systems Engineering mit Eclipse" by Michael Jastram. Is ISO/IEC 29110 for me? The following statements and questions should help you decide whether ISO 29110 may be useful to you: You develop software or systems. Your current process is lightweight, and you are looking for a more formal approach towards development. You want to benefit from established best practices. You operate in an environment with regulatory requirements. You looked at ISO/IEC 15288 in the past, and the idea seemed good, but in practice, it turned out  too heavy-weight. You want to work agile? ISO/IEC 29110 does not preclude a lifecycle.  From the standard: "ISO/IEC 29110 is not intended to preclude the use of different life cycles such as: waterfall, iterative, incremental, evolutionary or agile." You are small? ISO/IEC 29110 is targeted at VSEs: "A Very Small Entity (VSE) is an entity (enterprise, organization, department or project) having up to 25 people" (from the Standard). Where to start? Even though ISO/IEC 29110 is supposedly lightweight, it consists of a dozen documents.  Scroll to the section Overview of the set of documents to learn more.  The actual "meat" of the standard is found in the Profiles.  These follow the naming convention 29110-5-m-n: m: The profile group: Currently, there is only the Generic profile group for Software (1) and Systems (6), respectively. These are not designed for safety critical systems. n: The profile, one of Entry, Basic, Intermediate, Advanced. So I suggest to start with the simplest profile, the Entry Profile for Software Engineering, which can be downloaded for free. ISO/IEC 29110-5-1-1: Entry Profile for Software Engineering The "meat" of this profile consists of two processes: One for Project Management (PM), and one for Software Implementation (SI).  As an example, the following shows the high-level diagram for PM (taken from the standard): Project Management consists of four major Activities, which cover the lifecycle from the creation of the Statement of Work, to the acceptance of the resulting software in the form of an Acceptance Record. The standard concisely defines all all products (like Statement of Work), but it does not prescribe anything regarding its form, nor does it prescribe a specific life cycle. Each rectangle in the diagram consists of a number of Tasks. For example, the Activity Project Assessment and Control (PM.3) consists of three tasks with their respective inputs and outputs, which can be visualized as follows: The role shown (Project Manager) is just the primary role.  Not shown are the additional performers, which in this case include the Work Team. The figure shown has been generated automatically with the Eclipse Process Framework, which allows the generation of interactive HTML. When deployed, each element in the figure can be clicked to show the details of those elements. Implementing a Profile In order to use a Profile, it needs to be tailored.  Specifically, the abstract description of Tasks has to be made concrete: For instance, a Change Request could simply be an entry in an issue tracker, or a formal document that gets updated on a regular basis with a signature underneath. Further, as the arrows already indicate, these are not sequential activities.  To make the profile concrete, the mode of operation must be fixed. Next steps This is the first post in a series.  Over the next months, we will post more on ISO 29110, as we believe that it has a lot of potential.  Further, we will pursue two additional activities: We will apply it on se-teaching.org, our initiative for light-weight, Eclipse-based systems engineering. We will attempt to model the Profile using the Eclipse Process Framework, a tool for process documentation that can publish in HTML. How the result can look like is nicely demonstrated by the OpenUP. Help with ISO 29110 Are you intrigued by ISO 29110? If you consider it for your organization, please contact us: As experts, we can help you with the evaluation or implementation of ISO 29110. Image Credit: Puzzle Image from http://profs.etsmtl.ca/claporte/English/VSE/VSE-packages.html [Less]

Last week, ReConf 2015 took place in Munich – this conference is the biggest on requirements an Europe, and the place where the Who is Who of RE meets.  First impressions have already been posted. Formal Mind was present in two capacities.  First, we ... [More] an exhibitor, sharing a booth with our partner Orange Moon Systems.  Second, we had a talk at the science track, given by Michael Jastram. Axiom Demos A big topic was ReqIF-based requirements exchange, which we support with our product Axiom. Initiated by the ProSTEP ReqIF Implementor Forum, we organized regular demos of a life requirements exchange between Axiom and other tools via ReqIF. These demos created a lot of interest and discussion, as can be seen from the photo. Axiom supports the intelligent exchange of requirements and supports a number of exchange scenarios.  It is available in our online store. Science Track: Visualizing Requirements Slides of the presentation >> The talk "Visualizing requirements" demonstrated how a simple set of requirements could be converted into an interactive visualization, in less than one hour. We selected a lane change warning system as the case study. Of course, textual requirements cannot be visualized directly.  Therefore, a model of the domain has to be created first, and this model is then connected to a visualization.  But once this is done, the domain model and visualization do not have to be changed again (unless the domain changes, of course). The actual functionality can then be defined using refinement, and the visualization will reflect this functionality.  Traceability allows the connection of functional requirements to the corresponding model elements. The following figure shows the visualization in action.   The controls on the left allow users to change the system state, and the visualization in the middle reflects this. The views on the right show the system state and history, which can be of interest in debugging invalid system states and other issues. Other Impressions This was the second time of the ReConf in the new location, Dolce Munich, and the organization was much better than the year before. Out of the four keynotes, the ones by Udo Wiegärtner and Ellen Gottesdiener were outstanding.  The other two did not convince me: Ralph Young did not manage to engage, and while Niels Pfläging was engaging, the content was not convincing. ReqIF was quite visible with exhibitors, pretty much all commercial tools offer a solution to import or export data via ReqIF.  Unfortunately, there was only one talk mentioning ReqIF, and this was only in the context of yet another ReqIF adapter for a commercial tool.  The last few years, ProStep used to have a talk, reporting on the activities of the Implementor Forum, but not this year.  On the positive side, this indicates that ReqIF is nothing special any more, but a commodity feature that is taken for granted. Last, I was surprised that agile is still such a hot topic.  I am surprised, because successful projects have always been managed in an agile manner, even 50 years ago – even if  the term had not been used back then.  We at Formal Mind always embraced agile approaches, even for large-scale safety-critical projects. [Less]

Last week, ReConf 2015 took place in Munich – this conference is the biggest on requirements an Europe, and the place where the Who is Who of RE meets.  First impressions have already been posted. Formal Mind was present in two capacities.  First, we ... [More] an exhibitor, sharing a booth with our partner Orange Moon Systems.  Second, we had a talk at the science track, given by Michael Jastram. Axiom Demos A big topic was ReqIF-based requirements exchange, which we support with our product Axiom. Initiated by the ProSTEP ReqIF Implementor Forum, we organized regular demos of a life requirements exchange between Axiom and other tools via ReqIF. These demos created a lot of interest and discussion, as can be seen from the photo. Axiom supports the intelligent exchange of requirements and supports a number of exchange scenarios.  It is available in our online store. Science Track: Visualizing Requirements Slides of the presentation >> The talk "Visualizing requirements" demonstrated how a simple set of requirements could be converted into an interactive visualization, in less than one hour. We selected a lane change warning system as the case study. Of course, textual requirements cannot be visualized directly.  Therefore, a model of the domain has to be created first, and this model is then connected to a visualization.  But once this is done, the domain model and visualization do not have to be changed again (unless the domain changes, of course). The actual functionality can then be defined using refinement, and the visualization will reflect this functionality.  Traceability allows the connection of functional requirements to the corresponding model elements. The following figure shows the visualization in action.   The controls on the left allow users to change the system state, and the visualization in the middle reflects this. The views on the right show the system state and history, which can be of interest in debugging invalid system states and other issues. Other Impressions This was the second time of the ReConf in the new location, Dolce Munich, and the organization was much better than the year before. Out of the four keynotes, the ones by Udo Wiegärtner and Ellen Gottesdiener were outstanding.  The other two did not convince me: Ralph Young did not manage to engage, and while Niels Pfläging was engaging, the content was not convincing. ReqIF was quite visible with exhibitors, pretty much all commercial tools offer a solution to import or export data via ReqIF.  Unfortunately, there was only one talk mentioning ReqIF, and this was only in the context of yet another ReqIF adapter for a commercial tool.  The last few years, ProStep used to have a talk, reporting on the activities of the Implementor Forum, but not this year.  On the positive side, this indicates that ReqIF is nothing special any more, but a commodity feature that is taken for granted. Last, I was surprised that agile is still such a hot topic.  I am surprised, because successful projects have always been managed in an agile manner, even 50 years ago – even if  the term had not been used back then.  We at Formal Mind always embraced agile approaches, even for large-scale safety-critical projects. [Less]

Better Documentation A while ago, we migrated the user documentation of Eclipse RMF and formalmind Studio to a new publishing technology (Latex).  This allows us to publish the documentation at  the same time on the Web, as a PDF and as built-in tool ... [More] documentation (Eclipse Help).  You can access the web and PDF from the Handbook page. In preparation for ReConf next week, we significantly improved the documentation.  Check out these improved chapters: Overview – with sections on terminology and on the work of the ProStep implementor forum. Import and Export – summarizes the options for getting data in and out of formalmind Studio. Presentations – A concise documentation of all available presentations (plug-ins). Searching – as the number of search options increased, we documented them properly. ... and many, many smaller improvements. Free Handbook: Visit our talk and booth at ReConf to receive a free print copy of the handbook (while supply lasts). New Writing Michael Jastram just published a guest blog article at modeling-languages.com on requirements modeling. Please check out the article and the site for more interesting reads. Further, the March issue of Eclipse Magazin (German) will carry the article "Systems Engineering mit Eclipse." (on sale starting March 16, 2015). Axiom Sale: ReConf Special Next week starts ReConf in Munich, arguably the most important conference on requirements engineering in Europe.  Michael Jastram will be present with a talk on visualizing requirements. We also take this opportunity to offer Axiom at a special conference price. Axiom is our component for intelligent requirements exchange.  Starting today, you can buy Axiom for €295, instead of €395.  The sale will end on March 20, 2015.  Please visit our Online-Store to take advantage of this offer. Newsletter Survey We asked – you answered.  Last month, we published a short questionnaire regarding our newsletter.  Here is a summary of your answers: No German newsletter. We asked whether you would prefer a German version of this newsletter.  Less than 10% of the respondents said yes. Of course, asking this question in English may defeat the purpose, to a degree.  Still, for now the blog will stay English only. What we will write about. While roughly a third of respondents were happy with the current mix, more than 70%  requested more of the following three topics: Techniques and methods in requirements management & engineering Eclipse-based tooling information (e.g. How-tos) Case studies Monthly schedule. Two thirds of respondents were happy with our monthly schedule, so we will stick with it. However, we will start writing more guest blog articles. Just tools, please. When asking for products and services, two thirds were interested in RE-tools, and more than half in MBSE tools. There was little interest in training, consulting and coaching. [Less]

Better Documentation A while ago, we migrated the user documentation of Eclipse RMF and formalmind Studio to a new publishing technology (Latex).  This allows us to publish the documentation at  the same time on the Web, as a PDF and as built-in tool ... [More] documentation (Eclipse Help).  You can access the web and PDF from the Handbook page. In preparation for ReConf next week, we significantly improved the documentation.  Check out these improved chapters: Overview – with sections on terminology and on the work of the ProStep implementor forum. Import and Export – summarizes the options for getting data in and out of formalmind Studio. Presentations – A concise documentation of all available presentations (plug-ins). Searching – as the number of search options increased, we documented them properly. ... and many, many smaller improvements. Free Handbook: Visit our talk and booth at ReConf to receive a free print copy of the handbook (while supply lasts). New Writing Michael Jastram just published a guest blog article at modeling-languages.com on requirements modeling. Please check out the article and the site for more interesting reads. Further, the March issue of Eclipse Magazin (German) will carry the article "Systems Engineering mit Eclipse." (on sale starting March 16, 2015). Axiom Sale: ReConf Special Next week starts ReConf in Munich, arguably the most important conference on requirements engineering in Europe.  Michael Jastram will be present with a talk on visualizing requirements. We also take this opportunity to offer Axiom at a special conference price. Axiom is our component for intelligent requirements exchange.  Starting today, you can buy Axiom for €295, instead of €395.  The sale will end on March 20, 2015.  Please visit our Online-Store to take advantage of this offer. Newsletter Survey We asked – you answered.  Last month, we published a short questionnaire regarding our newsletter.  Here is a summary of your answers: No German newsletter. We asked whether you would prefer a German version of this newsletter.  Less than 10% of the respondents said yes. Of course, asking this question in English may defeat the purpose, to a degree.  Still, for now the blog will stay English only. What we will write about. While roughly a third of respondents were happy with the current mix, more than 70%  requested more of the following three topics: Techniques and methods in requirements management & engineering Eclipse-based tooling information (e.g. How-tos) Case studies Monthly schedule. Two thirds of respondents were happy with our monthly schedule, so we will stick with it. However, we will start writing more guest blog articles. Just tools, please. When asking for products and services, two thirds were interested in RE-tools, and more than half in MBSE tools. There was little interest in training, consulting and coaching. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

Requirements require some effort to read and understand. But what if you could bring them to life? This is possible, and you can see this at this year's ReConf at the science track on Monday, March 16 2015. Visit our booth us at ReConf 2015.  Please ... [More] contact us to receive a discount code. No matter how requirements are captured, there are usually two drawbacks about them: (1) They don't look like the "real thing", and (2) they are inanimate. The first can be corrected to a degree by simply including images into your requirements document.  In fact, sometimes the marketing department will deliver some of the artwork.  The second is what can be fixed as described here, and what we will present at ReConf 2015. Using BMotion Studio to create interactive specifications At our talk at ReConf, we will build a simple traffic light system.  We will move from requirements to an interactive visualization in less than an hour.  We use the tool Rodin, enhanced by a few plugins.  Everything you need is freely available. Let's start with the requirements.  We won't describe them here in detail.  The figure to the right tells it all: We have a street with traffic lights that allow pedestrians to cross safely. We assume that the hardware is in place, and that the task is to build the controller to drive the system. In order to build an interactive visualization, we need a model of the domain (the traffic lights, etc.) and the requirements.  This is the biggest catch in this approach, you need an expert who can model this with an appropriate modeling language.  In the talk, we will use Event-B. How such a model looks in detail is described in the tutorial of the Rodin Handbook. Building the visualization Now it gets interesting.  The Plugin BMotion Studio (BMS) has a graphical editor.  The image of the traffic lights can simply be imported, providing the foundation for the visualization. For the visualization to work, two things need to happen: (1) We need to change the colors of the traffic lights, and (2) we need to make the buttons interactive.  The following picture shows the BMS graphical editor: You can see a palette on the right side.  One of the available elements is an Ellipse.  To make the colors changeable, we simply draw a circle over each of the "lamps" of the traffic lights.  The figure shows this.  The red light is selected, showing the handles that allow the resizing of the circle, to fit properly over the image.  In the properties view (not shown), the color can be selected. Next, the newly created elements must be connected to the formal model.  This is done by right-clicking on the circle and adding an observer.  This will open the following dialog, which has already been configured to connect the model (via the Predicate) with the visualization.  If the predicate is true, then the background color is set to the given color value, which represents a light red. This process has to be repeated for all lights. As the two lights for the cars behave identically, the second light can be created by copy and paste. The buttons are created in a similar fashion, except that they trigger an event (instead of being an observer, like the lights). Running the visualization After the visualization is wired, it can be started.  Users can interact with it by pressing the button and by propagating to the transitions of the traffic light regime. This can also be done in an automated fashion, and the tool can be employed to detect violations of requirements or deadlocks. Decoupling the visualization from the implementation What we modeled here was simply the domain, not the functionality.  In other words, nothing we did so far constrained the functionality in any way.  To give an extreme example, we are still free to provide an implementation that switches all lights on at the same time. To provide the actual traffic light functionality, we'd have to incorporate more requirements into the model. Especially the requirements responsible for the light regime.  But this would not require any changes to the visualization. In practice, this could also be used for situations where the same hardware is used for different variants (e.g. a standard and a luxury variant).  The same visualization would then be driven by two distinct implementations. We hope that this little overview made you curious and look forward to seeing you at ReConf 2015. [Less]

Requirements require some effort to read and understand. But what if you could bring them to life? This is possible, and you can see this at this year's ReConf at the science track on Monday, March 16 2015. Visit our booth us at ReConf 2015.  Please ... [More] contact us to receive a discount code. No matter how requirements are captured, there are usually two drawbacks about them: (1) They don't look like the "real thing", and (2) they are inanimate. The first can be corrected to a degree by simply including images into your requirements document.  In fact, sometimes the marketing department will deliver some of the artwork.  The second is what can be fixed as described here, and what we will present at ReConf 2015. Using BMotion Studio to create interactive specifications At our talk at ReConf, we will build a simple traffic light system.  We will move from requirements to an interactive visualization in less than an hour.  We use the tool Rodin, enhanced by a few plugins.  Everything you need is freely available. Let's start with the requirements.  We won't describe them here in detail.  The figure to the right tells it all: We have a street with traffic lights that allow pedestrians to cross safely. We assume that the hardware is in place, and that the task is to build the controller to drive the system. In order to build an interactive visualization, we need a model of the domain (the traffic lights, etc.) and the requirements.  This is the biggest catch in this approach, you need an expert who can model this with an appropriate modeling language.  In the talk, we will use Event-B. How such a model looks in detail is described in the tutorial of the Rodin Handbook. Building the visualization Now it gets interesting.  The Plugin BMotion Studio (BMS) has a graphical editor.  The image of the traffic lights can simply be imported, providing the foundation for the visualization. For the visualization to work, two things need to happen: (1) We need to change the colors of the traffic lights, and (2) we need to make the buttons interactive.  The following picture shows the BMS graphical editor: You can see a palette on the right side.  One of the available elements is an Ellipse.  To make the colors changeable, we simply draw a circle over each of the "lamps" of the traffic lights.  The figure shows this.  The red light is selected, showing the handles that allow the resizing of the circle, to fit properly over the image.  In the properties view (not shown), the color can be selected. Next, the newly created elements must be connected to the formal model.  This is done by right-clicking on the circle and adding an observer.  This will open the following dialog, which has already been configured to connect the model (via the Predicate) with the visualization.  If the predicate is true, then the background color is set to the given color value, which represents a light red. This process has to be repeated for all lights. As the two lights for the cars behave identically, the second light can be created by copy and paste. The buttons are created in a similar fashion, except that they trigger an event (instead of being an observer, like the lights). Running the visualization After the visualization is wired, it can be started.  Users can interact with it by pressing the button and by propagating to the transitions of the traffic light regime. This can also be done in an automated fashion, and the tool can be employed to detect violations of requirements or deadlocks. Decoupling the visualization from the implementation What we modeled here was simply the domain, not the functionality.  In other words, nothing we did so far constrained the functionality in any way.  To give an extreme example, we are still free to provide an implementation that switches all lights on at the same time. To provide the actual traffic light functionality, we'd have to incorporate more requirements into the model. Especially the requirements responsible for the light regime.  But this would not require any changes to the visualization. In practice, this could also be used for situations where the same hardware is used for different variants (e.g. a standard and a luxury variant).  The same visualization would then be driven by two distinct implementations. We hope that this little overview made you curious and look forward to seeing you at ReConf 2015. [Less]

As newspapers and TV stations get ready to publish their annual reviews and retrospectives of 2014, they are bound to forget to report the remarkable progress that has been made on the Eclipse Requirements Modeling Framework this year.  But no fear ... [More] , we shall now remedy this. Below you will find the RMF highlights from 2014. We also include an outlook for 2015. Finally: Search takes off Long overdue, we focused this year on an important, but neglected, feature: search.  This is now available in three forms: First, we introduced a search-as-you-type dialog in the toolbar, that allows you to search through the open editor.  Rows that do not match are collapsed, but don't disappear completely so that you can guess the position of the match within your spec. Second, we implemented a raw search dialog that integrates into the standard Eclipse search framework.  We've described it here.  It also supports replacing, in addition to search. Third, we implemented another search interface on top of the search infrastructure.  While the raw search interface provides access to the bare search data, the new interface focuses on being user-friendly.  For instance, the names of the attributes are selected from a drop-down.  Below is a screenshot of the new search interface, which is already available in the latest formalmind Studio. Its use should be intuitive, documentation will follow soon. Active Committers There were 426 commits in 2014, and RMF is now tested with 883 automated unit tests.  This work has been done by five committers.  This year, a new committer joined the ranks, Hussein Mhanna from All4Tec. He already contributed to search, CSV import, ID management and more. Having another active committer clearly helped us to  increase our pace, as you can see from the diagram on the right (covers the last three months).  Note that this is work that goes directly into the open source. Release Reviews for IP Cleanliness The Eclipse Foundation understands the needs of businesses, and IP cleanliness is an important consideration when using open source software in a commercial environment.  Therefore, the Foundation requires release reviews for official releases, which we started to perform this year.  As this creates a significant overhead, we reduced our release cycle to three releases a year.  We will keep making intermediate release candidates, and formalmind Studio will always include the latest features. Collaboration with the ProSTEP Implementor Forum As members of the ProSTEP Implementor Forum, we ensure that not only is formalmind Studio compatible with ReqIF, but also honors the implementation guidelines issued by the forum.  The test data used in the forum are generated by Formal Mind, using RMF. The implementation guide describes a format for storing a so-called "conversation ID" in the ReqIF file.  A conversation ID is useful for tracking where requirements are coming from.  This is particularly useful if a user has more than one concurrent exchange (e.g. a manufacturer exchanging requirements with multiple suppliers). RMF now supports this conversation ID natively.  Formal Mind's Axiom Component also supports data exchange using the conversation ID. The implementation guide also defines a number of standard attribute names.  Some tools, most notably Rational DOORS from IBM, unify the ReqIF.Text and ReqIF.ChapterName attributes into the same column.  RMF now offers this option as well.  This is shown in the screenshot below.  In the column configuration (ProR | Column Configuration...), there is now the option Unified Column, which creates this special column.  It can carry a column name you choose and be rearranged like all the "regular" columns.  In the specification editor, the column name is shown in a different color: Many small (and big) improvements A lot has been done under the hood, but the following list describes the most notable changes that are visible to the user: Date handling got improved significantly by providing a date/time-picker in the user interface, and by making rendering of dates prettier. Better control for selecting enumeration values.  The pop-up dialog now has checkboxes and a button allowing the operation to be canceled.  If there are too many entries, a scrollbar is shown. Automatically open the contained specification, if there is exactly one.  This is useful when sharing ReqIF-documents with partners that are not so familiar with formalmind Studio.  Upon opening the file, they immediately see the requirements document. Limiting the height of cells, to improve scrolling behavior.  Large cells are now truncated.  By double-clicking, the full content is still visible, and contains scrollbars. for navigation. Images are scaled to to the width of the cell, so even huge images are visible as a whole.  Again, by double-clicking, the original will be restored and can be inspected in detail. Print-to-HTML got improved and now supports embedded objects.  When you have a specification open and active, you can access it via File | Print.... Robust solution for ID uniqueness within a ReqIF model. Copy operations are now guaranteed to ensure distinct IDs. We started to build an infrastructure for ReqIF validation for consistency. An initial Import of comma-separated data (CSV import) is now available. You can access it via File | Import | ReqIF | CSV. This year, we also migrated the format of the documentation, giving it a much more professional appearance.  Documentation is accessible within formalmind Studio (via Help | Help Contents), on the Web, and as a PDF. Ensuring compatibility of RMF to Java 6 - Java 8 and Eclipse 3.8 - Eclipse 4.4. formalmind Studio is based on Eclipse 4.4. Improving the update mechanism and organization of the update sites. Lots of bug fixes. Plans for 2015 We have ambitious goals for 2015, which include: Fixing of selection bugs in the specification editor. This is the most important editor of formalmind Studio, and we plan on making it significantly more user-friendly and bug-free in 2015. A better wizard for new ReqIF models that uses the standard attributes from the ProSTEP Implementor Forum. Validation for ReqIF consistency, as well as for your own validation logic. Multiple File Support - the ReqIF standard allows linking across files, and RMF should support this as well. Better Export and Reporting. This is open source - so help is always welcome.  There are many ways for contributing.  Contact us on the forum if you want to help, for instance: You can report bugs. You can improve the documentation. You can contribute code. If you are a business using RMF or formalmind Studio, you can sponsor a feature or commission customization, integration or training. You can donate or buy support. Don't forget: Axiom for Sale Until the End of the Year Four weeks ago, we launched our first commercial component for formalmind Studio: Axiom is our solution for intelligent requirements exchange.  If you regularly share requirements with partners that need selective updating, Axiom may be the solution. Axiom is for sale for a special introduction price until the end of 2014, so take advantage of this offer and use up your remaining 2014 budget. Mark the Date: ReConf 2015 in Munich (March 16.-19., 2015) Michael Jastram will give a talk at the scientific track at ReConf 2015. Formal Mind will also be exhibitor, so if you will attend ReConf, please contact us to meet us at our booth. Happy Holidays We are sure that you applied professional requirements management for your holiday planning, allowing you to have a punctual, relaxed holiday season.  See you next year! [Less]