ICSE 2011 Workshops

Multicore processors are ubiquitous and every new computer is a truly parallel machine. This is a fundamental change in the history of computing: parallelism is not confined to scientific applications any more but becomes available for everyone at low cost. Everyday applications and industry applications will need to be parallel in order to exploit the full hardware potential. As a consequence, software engineers now face the challenge of parallelizing applications of all sorts. Compared to sequential applications, our repertoire of tools and methods for cost-effectively developing reliable and robust parallel applications is spotty. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners with diverse backgrounds in order to advance the state of the art in multicore software engineering.

At the core of video games are complex interactions leading to emergent behaviors. This complexity creates difficulties architecting components, predicting their behaviors and testing the results. Software engineering hasn't yet been able to meet the demands of the games industry, an industry that works at the forefront of technology and creativity, where creating a fun experience is the most important metric of success. GAS 2011 will explore the demands of game creation and ascertain how the software engineering community can contribute to this important creative domain. Furthermore, GAS 2011 will investigate how games can help aid the software engineering process or improve software engineering education. Research in these areas has been exciting and interesting, and GAS 2011 will be the first time practitioners from all three fields to have the opportunity to come together at ICSE to investigate the possibilities of this innovative research area.

While there is a great deal of interest in developing tool support for refactoring, researchers and tool vendors rarely work together. This forum will enable the transfer of ideas and expertise both ways: researchers can show the state-of-the-art analyses they are using in developing tool support for refactoring, and tool vendors can offer valuable insights on the challenges of scaling such analyses to realistic applications. By bringing together researchers and tool vendors we can shorten the time to embody ideas into production systems. In addition, by making researchers aware of what others are working on, the potential for reinventing the wheel is reduced while the potential for creative collaboration is enhanced.This workshop is the next step in our ongoing effort to create such a community, building on our successful refactoring workshops at ECOOP 2007 and OOPSLA 2008.

Flexible modeling tools aim to bridge the gap between formal modeling tools and informal, free-form tools. Formal modeling tools revolve around precisely-defined notations and emphasize construction and analysis of precise models. They offer well-known advantages, such as multiple views of the same model, consistency management and domain-specific assistance. Informal, free-form tools, such as pencil and paper, whiteboards and office tools (word processors, spreadsheets and drawing/presentation tools), are also often used for modelling, despite the fact that they lack many of the advantages of formal tools. Instead, they emphasize speed and flexibility, and offer complementary advantages, such as free-form editing, unconstrained work order, and not forcing users to commit too early to specific choices. Flexible modeling tools seek to combine the advantages of both formal and free-form tools.

The focus of the workshop will be on challenge problems, particularly relating to the tradeoffs between flexibility and precision/formality. In burgeoning fields, it is valuable for the community to identify key, difficult problems that help to define the research area and serve as a means of evaluating the success of proposed solutions in that area. The concrete goals of this workshop are to identify a foundational set of challenges and concerns for the field of flexible modeling, as well promising future directions for addressing these challenges. To that end, it will bring together people who understand tool users' needs, usability, user interface design and tool infrastructure.

Cloud Computing has engendered a disruptive change in the requirements, architecture, implementation and evolution methodologies for software – in short, it has challenged our thinking as software engineering (SE) researchers and practitioners in ways that we as a community are still scrambling to find out.

Whether you are interested in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) such as Amazon Web Services, or AWS; platform-as-a-service (PaaS) including Google App Engine or Azure; software-as-a-service (SaaS) e.g., salesforce.com; or in frameworks that enable the above like Apache Hadoop or Microsoft’s Dryad, we feel that the time is ripe to rethink SE foundations in light of the cloud.

The SECLOUD workshop will focus on identifying the SE for cloud “grand challenges” that lay before us. We will debate existing notions of SE for the construction of cloud services and for their deployment. We will evangelize success stories and how they were arrived at. We anticipate as outcomes the definition of a long-term concrete SE research agenda for cloud, and the sharing of existing SE for cloud “tribal knowledge” that can be applied in the short-term.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a fundamental building-block of the upcoming Internet of Things, as they enable seamless integration of the digital and physical worlds. Despite the interest raised by this decade-old research topic, the development of WSN software is still carried out in a rather primitive fashion, by building software directly atop the operating system and by relying on the individual, hard-earned programming skills. Software engineering (SE) support is therefore sought, not only to ease the development task but also to make it more reliable, dependable, and repeatable.

The aim of SESENA11 is to attract researchers belonging to both the SE and WSN communities, not only to exchange their recent research results on the topic, but also to stimulate discussion about the core open problems and to define a shared research agenda. The workshop welcomes both research contributions and position statements. SESENA11 will also include a "speakers' corner" session composed by impromptu presentations where any of the attendees will be given a chance to present their own views in very short bouts.

By adopting Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) practices, organizations can achieve significant improvement in time-to-market, engineering and maintenance costs, portfolio size, and quality. However, despite the known benefits of SPLE over traditional reuse approaches, SPLE is still in the early adopter stage.

The main goal of PLEASE is to bring together industrial practitioner and software product line researchers in order to couple real-life industrial problems with concrete solutions. We plan for a 2-day highly interactive event in which concrete solutions will be proposed for the identified industrial problems. Besides promoting SPLE adoption, this will also allow validating existing techniques developed by the research community and identifying unresolved problems in the SPLE area. As the result, we will be able to feed researchers with real-life industrial SPLE problems and to establish agenda for future research. These goals are in the spirit of moving researchers and industrial practitioners into Pasteur's Quadrant.

This event will also allow industrial practitioners to learn from each other's experience and to establish long lasting collaboration between the industry and research. Towards this end, we will also discuss and establish measures of progress and benefits from applying different solutions.

There are enormous opportunities for use-inspired, fundamental research in computer science and software and systems engineering research in the domain of health, healthcare and medical informatics. To date, however, the health and software engineering research communities have had very little interaction. The consequence is that important research problem formulations remain unrecognized and innovative approaches remain undeveloped. The goal of this workshop is to bridge this divide to help catalyze software engineering research and development activities in the demanding domains of health, healthcare and medical informatics. The workshop will thus bring together distinguished researchers from both of these fields, who are already active at the boundaries between the fields, to develop a vision and strategy for research community formation and activity in the coming years.

The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the software development community as a way to understand and communicate issues of intrinsic quality, value, and cost. The idea is that developers sometimes accept compromises in a system in one dimension (e.g., modularity) to meet an urgent demand in some other dimension (e.g., a deadline), and that such compromises incur a “debt”: on which “interest” has to be paid and which should be repaid at some point for the long-term health of the project. Little is known about technical debt, beyond feelings and opinions. The software engineering research community has an opportunity to study this phenomenon and improve the way it is handled. We can offer software engineers a foundation for managing such trade-offs based on models of their economic impacts. The goal of this second workshop is to discuss managing technical debt as a part of the research agenda for the software engineering field.

Software clones are identical or similar pieces of code, design or other artifacts. Clones are known to be closely related to various issues in software engineering, such as software quality, complexity, architecture, refactoring, evolution, licensing, plagiarism, and so on. Various characteristics of software systems can be uncovered through clone analysis, and system restructuring can be performed by merging clones. The goals of this workshop are to bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to evaluate the current state of research and applications, discuss common problems, discover new opportunities for collaboration, exchange ideas, envision new areas of research and applications, and explore synergies with similarity analysis in other areas and disciplines.

The Sixth International Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering (TEFSE 2011) will bring together researchers and practitioners to examine the challenges of recovering and maintaining traceability for the myriad forms of software engineering artifacts, ranging from user needs to models to source code. The objective of the 6th edition of TEFSE is to build on the work the traceability research community has completed in identifying the open traceability challenges. In particular, it is intended to be a working event focused on discussing the main problems related to software artifact traceability and propose possible solutions for such problems. Moreover, the workshop also aims at identifying key issues concerning the importance of maintaining the traceability information during software development, to further improve the cooperation between academia and industry and to facilitate technology transfer.

Software engineering project courses where student teams are geographically distributed can effectively simulate the problems of globally distributed software development (DSD). However, this pedagogical model has proven difficult to adopt or sustain. It requires significant pedagogical resources and collaboration infrastructure. Institutionalizing such courses also requires compatible and reliable teaching partners.

The purpose of this workshop is to foster a community of international faculty and institutions committed to developing, supporting, and teaching DSD. Foundational materials presented will include pedagogical materials and infrastructure developed and used in teaching DSD courses (by the organizers and participants) along with results and lessons learned. Long-range goals include: lowering adoption barriers by providing common pedagogical materials, validated collaboration infrastructure, and a pool of potential teaching partners from around the globe.

Service-oriented systems represent a new class of software system in which software is being used and integrated as external, loosely-coupled services rather than being physically integrated and owned permanently.  Service-oriented systems provide a more flexible approach to software development, provisioning and maintenance because services offer reusable functionality that can be combined to support business processes (or similar) that are dynamic by nature.  This enables the adaptation to changes in a system's environment as well as to the continuously evolving system requirements that are commonplace today.  However, service orientation poses challenges to more traditional approaches to software development, stemming from the lack of homogeneity of its basic components and from the requirement of being able to accommodate changes and dynamic evolution right from the beginning.  In this respect, the workshop aims at finding possibilities of synergy between Software Engineering (SE) technologies and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) that are beneficial to both fields.

The workshop on the Automation of Software Test (AST) seeks high quality research and industrial case study papers on the theory and practice of software test automation whilst encouraging discussions through Charette presentations. The focus of AST is aimed at providing researchers and practitioners with a forum for exchanging ideas and experiences, developing an understanding of the fundamental challenges, articulating a vision for the future, and finding promising solutions to pressing problems.

The Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners to discuss the progress of software metrics. The motivation for this workshop is the low impact that software metrics has on current software development. The goals of this workshop are to critically examine the evidence for the effectiveness of existing metrics and to identify new directions for development of software metrics.

Social software is built around an "architecture of participation" where user data is aggregated as a side-effect of using Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 implies that processes and tools are socially open, and that content can be used in several different contexts. Web 2.0 tools and technologies support interactive information sharing, data interoperability and user centered design. For instance, wikis, blogs, tags and feeds help us organize, manage and categorize content in an informal and collaborative way. Some of these technologies have made their way into collaborative software development processes and development platforms. These processes and environments are just scratching the surface of what can be done by incorporating Web 2.0 approaches and technologies into collaborative software development. Web 2.0 opens up new opportunities for developers to form teams and collaborate, but it also comes with challenges for developers and researchers. Web2SE aims to improve our understanding of how Web 2.0, manifested in technologies such as mashups or dashboards, can change the culture of collaborative software development.

SHARK focuses on current and emerging methods, languages, notations, technologies and tools to extract, represent, share, use and reuse architectural knowledge. Architectural Knowledge (AK) is the integrated representation of the software architecture of a software-intensive system (or a family of systems), the architectural design decisions, and the external context/environment. It is recognized as the means for architecture governance; it facilitates and supports collaboration and the transfer of expertise.

In this sixth SHARK edition we will investigate the approaches for AK personalization, where knowledge is not codified through templates or annotations, but it is exchanged through the discussion between the different stakeholders. Therefore, the emphasis does not lie on resource-intensive documentation but on lightweight, just-in-time conversations facilitated by 'knowledge yellow pages' (who knows what). The AK community has not explored AK personalization in depth, even though it has acknowledged its value as a viable approach.

In good tradition, SHARK aims to bring together researchers and practitioners that are interested in sharing and reusing architectural knowledge. The workshop will kick-start with short position statements from the paper authors. The main focus will be on fostering creative discussion between the participants, on specific themes.

SUITE is a workshop that focuses on exploring the notion of search as a fundamental activity during software development. The first two editions of SUITE were held at ICSE 2009/2010, and they have focused on the building of a research community that brings researchers and practioners who are interested in the research areas that SUITE addresses. While this thrid workshop continues the effort of community building, it puts more focus on addressing directly some of the urgent issues identified by previous two workshops, encouraging researchers to contribute to and take advantage of common datasets that we have started assembling for SUITE research.

Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software supports a wide variety of domains including nuclear physics, crash simulation, satellite data processing, fluid dynamics, climate modeling, bioinformatics, and vehicle development. The increase in the importance of CSE software motivates the need to identify and understand appropriate software engineering (SE) practices for CSE. Because of the uniqueness of CSE software development, existing SE tools and techniques developed for the business/IT community are often not efficient or effective. Appropriate SE solutions must account for the salient characteristics of the CSE development environment. This situation creates an opportunity for members of the SE community to interact with members of the CSE community to address this need. This workshop facilitates that collaboration by bringing together members of the SE community and the CSE community to share perspectives and present findings from research and practice relevant to CSE software. A significant portion of the workshop is devoted to focused interaction among the participants with the goal of generating a research agenda to improve tools, techniques, and experimental methods for studying CSE software engineering.