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Challenge

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Ericsson is a world leader in communications technology and services with headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden. The organization consists of more than 111,000 experts who provide customers in 180 countries with innovative solutions and services. Together we are building a more connected future where anyone and any industry is empowered to reach their full potential. Ericsson is also one of the largest software development organizations in the world. As a sponsor of several important Eclipse PolarSys projects, including the Papyrus UML toolchain, Ericsson is a key player in the open source Eclipse ecosystem. In 2015, ELTE-Soft, the Swedish and Hungarian R&D branches of Ericsson, and IncQuery Labs successfully collaborated on an open source development project related to the Papyrus ecosystem. The main goal of the project was toolchain modernization, i.e., building bridges between legacy UML modeling tools and Papyrus.

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Solution

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A rewarding aspect of the project for us was assisting in the design for xtUML-RT, a new UML-related modeling language that combines the features of BridgePoint and IBM Rational design tool families in an elegant and efficient solution. The project also aimed to improve the scalability of code generation. IncQuery Labs were brought into partnership because of the complexity of this task. Specializing in scalable tool integration, IncQuery Labs have built a framework for compiling UML models into efficient, incremental C++ code. This approach provides a productivity boost to engineers, as it drastically reduces long wait times for build phases, turning several minutes of waiting into just seconds of delay. This is a key benefit and a unique selling point for design tools.

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Result

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Ultimately, this project was an open source win as well. Our work with Ericsson has continued in OpenCPS, an EU-funded ITEA3 project that builds on our results, further encouraging their continued development.

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