ESE Congress 2017

This week I had the pleasure of attending at least one day of the 10th ESE Congress in Sindelfingen. I was able to give two presentations on Tuesday, on modeling requirements and on ReqIF.

The ESE Congress was organized by Peter Siwon who I interviewed for this blog in the past. To anticipate: The event was definitely worthwhile.

The range of topics

As the name suggests, the Embedded Software Engineering Congress is primarily about software that runs on control units. On the one hand, this includes the topics that I also deal with: Requirements, modeling, methods, functional safety, etc. But there were also topics that I normally only deal with marginally, such as hardware (control units), operating systems, programming languages, etc. It's always exciting for me to think outside the box.

However, the topics of modeling and requirements were large enough to justify their own track. Dominant topics occupied several tracks, including implementation, management, safety, security, automotive and test & quality.

Modeling of requirements

My presentation on the Field-tested requirements modeling was placed in the modeling track and, with around 150 participants, ensured that some participants had to stand. The topic is obviously topical and fitted in well with the Software requirements analysis with UML by Thomas Batt and A model says more than 1000 pictures by Andreas Willert.

Requirements Interchange Format

My second presentation was about Loss-free requirements - the most important facts about ReqIF. As many readers know, I have been working with ReqIF, the Requirements Interchange Format, for over ten years. This is a standardized exchange format for requirements. This format enables end-to-end traceability to the supplier (and back), as well as the interlinking of requirements with other system development artifacts. I have compiled more information in my knowledge library, the ReqIF.academy.

Fuel consumption: 3700 km per liter

As I only attended the conference for one day, I was only able to attend one keynote: From London to Rome and back - with just 1 liter of petrol by Marco Schmid. This presentation was about the Shell Eco-Marathonfor which Fimra Schmid had developed a live telemetry system within 10 weeks. Even though I am cautious when it comes to corporate-sponsored content, you could tell that Marco Schmid was bubbling over with enthusiasm. And that was certainly one of the most important ingredients for the success of the project described here.

In addition to the idea and the enthusiasm of the Eco-Marathon, it was of course also about the technology. While the first version of the device still had to be housed in a fairly large standard housing, the third generation was already a small streamlined mouse that was mounted on the vehicles. The teams consisted of students who mounted them on their vehicles and connected the sensors internally.

Unfortunately, the details of the development were only dealt with very superficially. The 10-strong German team worked together with other colleagues in various countries, and a microservice architecture was used, which allowed the teams to work largely independently.

Fun with table football

The evening was rounded off by the developer party, where a foosball tournament was held on extra-long tables.

All in all, a well-rounded event, and I'm already looking forward to next year's ESE Congress.