Custom-MADE

Custom-MAnangement of DEcision -- A DSL based approach to capture and manage your decisions during a software development project

Vision

Documenting decisions helps to preserve knowledge over a long time to diminish software erosion and to ease maintenance and refactoring. However, the capture and structured use of decisions in practice is still limited. There is an oversupply of models to capture decisions and a clear lack of tools to help deal with this oversupply. In addition, existing tools have rarely gone beyond the prototype stage. Therefore, with Custom-MADE we want to develop a subtle tool chain to support the process of recording decision as an integral part of agile software development. In order to do so, it will be the task of this software development project to select, combine and integrate existing techniques into a tool chain. This tool chain is supposed to support two main use cases:

• Support modelling a decision capture DSL on the basis of which decision will be recorded by the end-user (software developers most likely).
• Provide the end-user with a full fledged web-based editor that complies to the defined decision DSL (providing a full language infrastructure) Instead of ordinary Markdown Templates this editor should be used to capture decisions. Additionally, the editor should be augmented with a software supporting the export of recorded decisions to standard formats as well as self-defined formats (e.g., PDF, MD, etc.)

Get Started

• Install the dependencies
• Clone the project
• Enter the project
• Run bash run.sh and it will start the application in three screens.
  • A website will open up. You might need to wait until all background processes finished starting up. If login attempts do still fail, just wait a little and retry. As soon as the login is successful, the background processes finished starting up.
  • Login as
  • user: user
  • password: password
  • You can view more information about the currently running screens with screen -x. Enter one of them with screen -x NNNN where NNNN is the listed pid of the desired screen.
  • Over time more screens should pop up which run an instance of a language server each.
• Stop the project and close everything with bash stop.sh.

System requirements

• A not too ancient Linux or MacOS. Windows is currently not supported.
• A somewhat capable CPU. For any language available (default in 04/2021 are two languages) Custom-MADE is going to compile an entire Xtext project including LSP-Binding.

Dependencies

For successful compilation and execution, the following software is required:

• screen -- GNU Screen
  • the start-up scripts use screen to start the separate processes
  • Screen version 4.08 has been tested and is working
• maven -- Apache Maven
  • for compiling the Xtext grammars
  • for validating and transforming DSLs
• gradle -- Gradle build tool
  • for compiling the Xtext grammars and the connected Language Server
• java -- Java Programming Language
  • Custom-MADE currently requires JDK 11! More recent JDK versions are not supported as of now.
• npm -- Node Package Manager
  • Used to compile the ReactJS front-end
• git -- Git -- distributed version control system
  • Custom-MADE employs git to manage the available languages and allows for connecting projects to existing git repositories
• mysql -- MySQL Server
  • Used to store data persistently. Tested for version 8.0.26. The database data has to match the values given in backend/src/main/resources/application.properties.
• yarn -- Yarn Package Manager
  • Used to run the Theia IDE.