While I worked for the German Aerospace Center (DLR) I was in the lead of a project team working on the SESIS project. Definitely one of the most interesting projects I ever head. During this time I was in charge of the development of the Reconfigurable Computing Environment (RCE). Since then I moved on and started to work for Sun. But the project has moved on – And I am so happy to see it grow more mature! RCE has now been released under a open source license and been renamed to Remote Component Environment! Great stuff – Two days ago it hit version 1.4.0 – My congratulations!

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Twitter gives you an unique chance to show your customers that your are actually improving your product. Twittering that bugs are fixed an when new features are added, tested and released helps keeping the noise down in forums etc. Also (future) customers can retweet or suggest additions. So to all management: Let your software developers twitter! It will help your product!

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I am a big fan of modular software. It allows the reuse of software parts and clear designs. Especially the later one. Think of a Object Orientated Software project where 100 of classes can just call each other – We invented OO programming for more cleaner designs and now the dependency graphs look horrible (have a look here), because every class depends on other classes and no clear boundaries are available.  With the help of modular design it is possible to clean it up. But it needs to be enforced (see also here). If you say a programmer you should do it, he won’t. Therefore I suggest using OSGi! (But OSGi can become a mess to: 1 2)

Now I discovered a project for modularity in space and satellite design. With CubeSat (10cm x 10cm x 10xm) cubes are used as modules for satellites. It is therefor possible to create 1U, 2U (two cubes) and XU (X cubes) big satellites. Great idea! And it seems to work. Only the reuseability does not seem to work

Also great it the reduction of cost by using this satellite model. This is also true when using modular designs in software. You can run successful projects within time and resource usage with the right planning, tools and a modular design.

Other sites about the CubeSat:

http://cubesat.atl.calpoly.edu

http://www.cubesatkit.com/  – yes you can even build your one

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Great blog post, which I should definetly try out sometime…Or it should even be a mandatory hook script!

http://andialbrecht.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/when-merging-fails/

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In the last weeks I have heard the following sentence more often: "Everybody who has done a software project knows that integration and development isn’t easy". This statement of does not make sense to me. Seems like a lame excuse which implies that all software projects need to be off schedule and integration is hard when putting software together.Which is not the case I think. There are very successful projects around. And they also face the "integration problem".

So this statement does not need to be true when doing it right (my own opinion and experience though ). Especially with all the tools, books and information available. I think this is even right for highly distributed software projects where the partners a scattered around the world. Yes we can do it right

P.S. I know a lot of links in there, but worth to follow (this is seemless self promotion )

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