I attended the first European Conference on Model Driven Architecture – Foundations and Applications (ECMDA-FA 2005) last week in Nurnberg, Germany. Monday I attended the workshop on Model Consistency in Model Driven Engineering. Tuesday I attended the workshop “From code centric to model centric software engineering: Practices, Implications and ROI”, and after the lunch break I made a shift to the tutorial “A Practical Guide to Metamodels and Transformations”. Wednesday and Thursday was the main conference days.

Sightseeing

The conference was very exciting and I really got a boost to my PhD project. I met a lot of interesting people, both new and old ones. I found several people who showed real interest in my project, and possible they are interested in trying, or perhaps participating in developing my activity diagram editor for eclipse.

Yesterday I held a lecture at ITU at the course “Data and Process Modelling”. The title of the lecture was “Business Process Modelling” and it lasted for three hours. In the afternoon there were exercises for the students for additional three hours.

I think the lecture went well and that the students found it interesting and learned what I had planned. The lecture contained three tool demonstrations for modelling and implementing business processes and a case for a loan approval was introduced and followed through the demonstrations.

My main purpose of the lecture was to give the students an insight in the complexity of modelling and implementing business processes. I focused on explaining the development process and the different views from the business analyst over the IT architect to the process developer. The exercise in the afternoon reflected the lecture; first the student had to try to be the business analyst to analyse and model a business process based on a textural description. They should model the business as it was and suggest a better way of doing business. Then they had to be an IT architect to evaluate the business process and make suggestions to the process model. At last they should try to be a process modeller and implement the business process model in BPEL.

I think the exercise when very well. All groups came through the exercises and I felt that there where good discussions about the different levels of abstraction in the development process. It was also interesting to see the differences in the models from the different groups and my suggested solution.

Two groups actually found it very interesting to model business processes and expressed wishes to work further with this topics in future projects – exiting!

The slides used for the lecture as well as the exercise can be found under Download Document -> Lectures ->