When developing a system design methodology, one can distinguish two main components. The first one is the process itself. This is an organizational management issue. Such a process is mostly people’s undertaking. It is universal and comes before using any tool. A methodology or using tools does not replace the process. Quality comes from having a quality process and quality people. This is the reason why the Open license Society will also investigate the process of developing systems as a cognitive process.
The second one is the tool set. For small scale developments, few tools are needed. In the simplest case a PC with a word processor and a lot of experience and self-discipline will do. But the more complex the system to be developed, the more support from tools is needed. Good tools reflect the natural quality development process. They can give additional benefits as well. Tools are there to automate, relieving us humans from the error-prone task of keeping track of more than 7 things at a time.
It is clear that developing such a process as a methodology with the supporting tools needs feedback from real practice. Hence the Open License Society seeks real pilot projects to test and improve the methodology developed. The Open License Society welcomes projects from its members.
The methodology itself is being developed in R&D projects, often composed of an international consortium. The Open License Society is actively seeking partners and corporate sponsors. If interested, please contact us.
The first R&D project is the OpenComRTOS. Executed with financial help from IWT of the Flemish Government, Open License Society is developing the essential runtime component of its methodology. Support for the use of formal methods to analyse the architecture before teh software is written and to validate the final source code is provided by the group of Prof. Boute of The University of Ghent (Intec). The use of formal methods to develop an RTOS is a novel development, before only applied to specific parts like the scheduler. OpenComRTOS as such is not just another RTOS, it is actually first of all a scalable communication layer based on prioritised message passing and packet switching tightly integrated with a distributed scheduler to provide hard real-time capability. The first results confirmed the validity of the approach. Not only is OpenComRTOS_L0 very performant and small (< 1 KB), important safety and security issues were discovered and integrated in the kernel.
While the OpenComRTOS architecture is very much driven by our experience and the formal methodology, Open License Society also want potential users to participate in the design review. Members of the review panel do not only get early access but have also the possibility to influence the design and environment to optimally support their own application domain. The layered architecture of OpenComRTOS provides this capability without having to modify the core of the RTOS. If you are interested in joining the user panel, please contact us.
[status: first relaese of OpenComRTOS_L0 on MLX16 and Windows NT with Visual Programing Environment available.].
OpenSpecs was developed as a web hosted environment to guide the process of requirements and specifications capturing, including elements of defining the architecture, normal cases, test cases and fault cases. While the web hosting allows for easy distributed team work, the systems grammar serves as a coach during the whole process. Pilot cases have shown that OpenSpecs can be used to cover multiple domains such as software engineering and development, business process engineering and implementing quality process standards.
[status: first beta release OpenSpecs as web based tool available]