Last week I attended my 10th (yes I said one-zero or tenth) Rational User Conference (aka IBM Innovate, aka Rational Software Developer User Conference, aka Rational Software Conference). It is also the 5th time I have attended while talking about OSLC. Hard to believe that Mik Kersten and myself did the first ever OSLC presentation back in 2009. It has been interesting to be part of the transition from people hearing "O S L C" and having no idea, to today where most attendees not only know what it is, they are actively working to build integrations using OSLC, encouraging their other tool suppliers to support it and active in various OSLC activities such as specification working groups or general community promotion. I has transitioned from an unknown new concept, to the way we do integrations. By "we", I'm not just talking about Rational, I'm talking about attendees there that were talking how how they are using OSLC such as Airbus, NEC, ...
Though, still many people have a hard time saying or spelling OSLC right (it is a tough one)...most commonly is OSCL. If only we pushed to rename it back in 2010 to something like I proposed as SLIC, that would have been...well "slick". I digress.
This year, I arrived a couple days before the official conference started as it was a good opportunity for those of us very active in OSLC to get together for some face-to-face discussions on OSLC strategy. This was spearheaded by the Steering Committee (SC). Out of these early discussions (which have been a continuation of ongoing thoughts by the community and SC), came the idea of an organizing and higher-level concept of "Integration Patterns". I threw together a page to articulate the thoughts, propose a way forward and start to gather interest. This was discussed at couple other times during the week, such as the OSLC SC discussion at the Wednesday's Birds of a Feather session, which was well received from the attendees.
Sunday afternoon held the Open Technology Summit, where various leaders in open technologies shared how various efforts have help drive business efficiencies and improve overall time and quality of delivery around such things as: OpenStack, OSLC, CloudFoundry, Apache Cordova, ...
I led a panel discussion titled "Best practices on implementing integrated tools" with panelist with a wide and vast set of experience (I hope to share the recording once I receive it)
After 5 years, Mik and I were reunited as we talked about "Lifecycle Tool Integration through Open Interfaces" (though Mik and I have been talking/collaborating this whole time, it wasn't like a band breakup and then reunion)
There were many other great conversations, learning how customers are looking to build out their own OSLC implementations by either evolving their own in house tools or looking to build adapters for 3rd party tools. The demand continues to grow and look forward to continue to helping them succeed by making their integrations happen.
As with many of these conferences, especially ones that you've gone to 10 times, it is great to catch up with many good friends I've made over the years. Now on to make sure we continue to deliver value and have some cool things to show and talk about next year (oh and at next week's EclipseCon France event and end of June's INCOSE conference).
