e-Framework Workshop

On Monday last week (12th), I went down to the e-Framework Workshop, which was held at Aston University in Birmingham. Bill Olivier provided an overview to the day, mentioning that the e-Framework was to provide coordination with JISC programmes and international partners, and to provide information as a knowledge base and links to supporting projects. An extremely interesting and useful animation (available here) demonstrated how the e-Framework is working to make sense of the Service Oriented Approach for the community.

The day ran with three simultaneous sessions (in the form of two presentations and repeated surgeries) and a final presentation, so it was not possible to attend every presentation. I went to Phil Nicholls’ talk on Service Usage Models (SUMs), Scott Wilson presenting on Agile Development and Hilary Dexter’s Managing requirements through to service specification, with everybody attending the final Scenario-based design talk by Chris Fowler. In particular, I found Scott’s presentation hard to follow, mainly as he didn’t show the slides he was using, making the concept more difficult to grasp. Hilary’s talk was use case-heavy, with several complex diagrams and although I have attended a UML workshop before and could follow most of the diagrams, it was perhaps a little detailed to follow in an hour-long presentation. Nevertheless, the information on requirements management and structuring a sue case document was helpful. Chris’s closing talk was well-presented and informative, going some way to providing advice on defining scenarios, although I wasn’t sure why this talk was the only one worthy of a single slot.

Overall, there was plenty to take from the day, but I’m not as clued up as I thought/hoped I’d be. I guess it will be worthwhile revisiting the presentations and audio files again.