Auch wenn er nicht mehr die Bezeichnung Office im Namen trägt, so rückt Microsofts SharePoint Server doch weiter an die Office-Clients heran. Während sich der Hersteller immer offensiver um die – auch kostenlose – Verbreitung seiner Client-Programme bemüht, muss sich SharePoint mehr und mehr als Umsatz- und Hoffnungsträger der Redmonder Office-Sparte bewähren.

In children’s playrooms and in secondary school projects programmable toys and entry level programming courses use visual programming languages instead of the (standard) textual source codes seen in Logo, BASIC, Java. Higher ed- ucation and research also propose visual programming or even (graphical) model based design to steepen the learning curve1 . Industry however appears unfazed with this approach. Textual source code is still the main means of representing software. Based on experience gained in laboratory exercises con- ducted with students of an undergraduate course in mecha- tronics this paper adresses the feasibility and efficiency of this approach.

A series of interviews conducted with companies in the field identified two hot spots in special-purpose machine software processes: scheduling and reuse. Two benchmark criteria are proposed to measure the quality of the processes with respect to reuse and scheduling in a specific company with respect to other companies. The significance of the criteria is shown by way of actual industry projects. An application is proposed where the criteria can be used to estimate efforts and schedules.