GAUGE: A Vision

GAUGE is to be about serving you to become better and better at what you do!

Whether you use Eiffel or not, know about it or not, one thing most of us want is to be our very best. This goal is certainly not a finish line, but a journey. There are many excellent groups all across the world and many are found here in the Atlanta area, with some of the finest minds right here in our own back yard. To this end, it is our vision to help each other along this journey to grow and expand our abilities to serve our clients or employers, giving them better and better quality with each passing month and year.

Eiffel as a language and as a system of software engineering is no stranger to this quest. While there are many excellent systems and schools of thought present in our profession, GAUGE will focus on Eiffel as expressed in Eiffel Software's EiffelStudio (presently version 7.0, soon to be 7.1).

EiffelStudio is a very fine IDE and rendition of the Eiffel language system and method and can be found at www.eiffel.com as a freely downloadable system. It is distributed under the GPL agreement, which means you can download it and use it FREE OF CHARGE. The IDE is not hobbled, trimmed down, time-boxed or otherwise less than its full-paid Enterprise version, so you can use, experiment, play, design, participate and enjoy EiffelStudio without paying a dime!

So, what will GAUGE focus on? Besides bringing Eiffel the method and language, as well as EiffelStudio into the awareness of the Atlanta software community, we have several ideas that we hope each participant will be excited to sink their teeth into:

1. Hearing, learning and adding personal input about Best Practices for Full Life-cycle Software Engineering, especially using Eiffel and EiffelStudio.
2. Integration of tools like Subversion, Tortoise, Kiwi log servers, Jenkins continuous integration tools and other technologies, specifically on how to use with Eiffel.
3. Sharing our experiences with Agile methodologies like Pair Programming, SCRUM and Use Case integration into software projects, especially how EiffelStudio integrates with these methods.
4. Actively building a GAUGE-built set of libraries focused around the needs of the group and actively contributed to by the group by way of EiffelStudio GPL using various SourceForge projects.
5. Examination and sharing about high quality coding and design standards using Eiffel the language with the excellent tools of Design by Contract, Multiple Inheritance, Agents, with an examination of the already excellent libraries shipping with EiffelStudio already.
6. A deep and core focus of building tools, documentation and helpful support to speed the learning of Eiffel the language and method for the GAUGE membership, to our mutual support and enjoyment!
7. Finally, to support our GAUGE membership in pursuit of entrepreneurial ambitions using Eiffel and EiffelStudio as the basis for building excellent businesses serving local Atlanta businesses with the finest software development we can offer!

In the midst of all of this, we want to have fun! To this end, we're working with the folks at Eiffel Software to provide a group that is rewarding, fun, intellectually challenging, but with a learning curve and gradient that is steep or simple as any group member might need or want. Perhaps we ought to have a motto? No Programmer Left Behind!

We hope to serve you and help you to reach the goals of being the best at what you do and at what you love to do -- software engineering at its finest!

Stay tuned! GAUGE is coming!