[aosd-announce] CFP: Recent Developments in High Quality Architecture Design Symposium

Thu Jun 28 06:34:29 EDT 2007

[Apologies for multiple copies]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON:

"Recent Developments in High Quality Architecture Design"
--

Date: July 6, 2007
Location: Waaier 3, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

Registration and info:
http://trese.cs.utwente.nl/workshops/HQADS/

SPONSORS
--------
Centre for Telematics and Information Technolgy (CTIT)
	http://www.ctit.utwente.nl/
ASML
	http://www.asml.com/
OCE
	http://www.oce.com/
PATO
	http://www.pato.nl/
PHILIPS
	http://www.philips.com/

SYMPOSIUM TOPIC
---------------

Due to the size and complexity of today's systems and the desire to  
achieve
better quality, for example, in robustness, flexibility, time-to- 
market, etc,
software development is becoming an increasingly complex discipline. In
particular, the activity of architectural design of software systems  
becomes of
increasing importance. The design of the architecture has a large  
influence on
the quality of the resulting system, but this process is still  
difficult and
cumbersome. During the last decades, software architecture  
development methods,
tools and approaches have been introduced to enhance this insight. This
symposium aims at bringing together practitioners and researchers to  
achieve a
better understanding of the problems of designing high quality software
architectures and how they appear in practice. In addition, experts  
present new
insights in addressing these problems. Also, significant attention  
will be paid
to the transfer of research results to an industrial setting.

The symposium "Recent Developments in High Quality Architecture Design"

contributes to an exchange of expertise in the field of high quality  
software
architecture design. Top researchers in the field of architecture  
design will
discuss new insights, share their experience in the application of  
advanced
design concepts in practical situations, and will discuss the important
trade-offs among software quality attributes. The symposium will be  
concluded
with an interactive panel discussing the benefits and obstacles of  
applying
aspects in mainstream software development.

OVERVIEW OF THE PROGRAM
-----------------------

Opening (9:20)
      "Challenges in Designing High-Quality Architectures"
         by Mehmet Aksit - University of Twente, The Netherlands
      "Semantics-based Composition and Analysis of Requirements"
        by Awais Rashid - University of Lancaster, United Kingdom
      "Improving Architecture Competence"
        by Paul Clements - Software Engineering Institute, United States
      "Evolvability for Software-Intensive Product Families"
        by Pierre America - Philips Research, The Netherlands

      [lunch break]

      "Xlinkit: what we did and where we want to go"
        by Anthony Finkelstein - University College London, United  
Kingdom
      "Models of Computational Intelligence for Quantitative Software
Engineering"
        by Witold Pedrycz - University of Alberta, Canada
      "Imperfect Information in Software Design Processes"
        by Joost Noppen - University of Twente, The Netherlands

      Panel: Improving Architecture Qualities in Industrial Context:  
Experiences
and Challenges
        Moderator: Prof.dr.ir. Mehmet Aksit, University Of Twente
        Panelists:
          dr. ir. Pierre America, Philips Research, The Netherlands
          dr. Pim van den Broek, University of Twente, The Netherlands
          dr. Paul Clements, Software Engineering Institute, United  
States
          prof. dr. Antony Finkelstein, University College London,  
United Kingdom
          prof. dr. Witold Pedrycz, University of Alberta, Canada
          dr. Awais Rashid, University of Lancaster, United Kingdom
End (17:00)

GOALS AND INTENDED AUDIENCE
---------------------------

During this symposium you have the opportunity to learn about the newest
developments in high quality software architecture design, some of  
its benefits
in software development, recent insights into the technology, and  
information
about the application of new developments in an industrial context.

The symposium addresses both practitioners and researchers:
* project managers, software architects, software analysts, software  
designers
and software developers who are facing the design of complex software  
systems
while considering an intricate interplay of quality trade-offs *  
researchers
who want to get up to date with the state-of-the-art research in  
Software
Architecture Development.

Typically, the intended audience has essential knowledge of software
architecture design and a good understanding of software engineering  
issues.

REGISTRATION AND COSTS
----------------------
The registration fee includes drinks and lunch, a handout with all  
presented
slides, and a copy of the PhD thesis "Imperfect Information in  
software Design
Processes" by Joost Noppen.

The registration fees are as follows:
- Companies: EUR 195
- Universities: EUR 75
- Students: Free
http://trese.cs.utwente.nl/workshops/HQADS/  for registration  
information, as
well as information about accommodation on and near the campus of the
University of Twente.

======================================================================== 
=====
DESCRIPTION OF THE SYMPOSIUM CONTENT

TALKS
=====

"Challenges in Designing High-Quality Architectures"
         by Mehmet Aksit - Universiteit Twente, University of Twente
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
-
Designing high-quality architectures demands from us finding adequate  
solutions
to the following problems: What are the relevant quality-attributes?  
How to
define and measure them? How do we know which quality-attributes are  
needed?
How do we steer the architecture design processes so that the desired  
quality
attributes are eventually fulfilled? How do we balance multiple quality
attributes if they are conflicting? How do we map architectures to  
feasible
realizations? In this talk we will outline these challenges from the
perspective of the state-of-the-art techniques and our research  
contributions.

"Semantics-based Composition and Analysis of Requirements"
        by Awais Rashid - University of Lancaster, United Kingdom
----------------------------------------------------------------
In this talk, I will discuss the limitations of the current syntactic
composition mechanisms in requirements engineering. I will highlight  
that such
composition mechanisms not only increase coupling between concerns  
but are also
insufficient to capture the intentionality of the concern compositions.
Furthermore, they force the requirements engineer to reason about  
semantic
influences and trade-offs among concerns from a syntactic  
perspective. I will
present a requirements description language (RDL) that enriches the  
existing
natural language requirements specification with semantic information  
derived
from the semantics of the natural language itself. Composition  
specifications
are written based on these semantics rather than requirements syntax  
hence
providing improved means for expressing the intentionality of the  
composition,
in turn facilitating semantics-based reasoning about concern  
influences and
trade-offs. I will also discuss the practicality of the use of this  
RDL by
outlining the automation support for requirements annotation  
(realized as an
extension of the Wmatrix natural language processing tool suite) to  
expose the
semantics which are in turn utilized to facilitate composition and  
analysis
(supported by the MRAT tool).

"Improving Architecture Competence"
        by Paul Clements - Software Engineering Institute, United States
----------------------------------------------------------------
High-quality architecture design results first and foremost from  
individuals,
teams, and organizations that are highly competence to produce them.  
The field
of software architecture has long (and appropriately) concentrated on  
improving
the technical aspects of architecture -- design, evaluation,  
documentation,
reengineering, and the like -- but in some parts of the field,  
attention is now
turning to those who produce architectures. This talk will highlight  
a project
at the Software Engineering Institute in measuring and improving the  
competence
of individual architects, architecture teams, and organizations that  
rely on
high-quality architectures for their livelihood. The project is taking a
multi-faceted approach, investigating organizational learning,  
organizational
coordination mechanisms, individual human competence theories and  
models, and a
duties-skills-knowledge approach to improving how architects do what  
they do.

"Xlinkit: what we did and where we want to go"
        by Anthony Finkelstein - University College London, United  
Kingdom
----------------------------------------------------------------
This talk will present xlinkit: a tool for checking constraints across
distributed data in software engineering. It will look at how the  
tool has been
realised in a commercial setting and will examine directions for the  
further
development of xlinkit.

"Models of Computational Intelligence for Quantitative Software  
Engineering"
        by Witold Pedrycz - University of Alberta, Canada
----------------------------------------------------------------
In Quantitative Software Engineering, being critical to many pursuits of
software development including cost estimation, complexity assessment,
reliability prediction and alike, we are faced with an array of  
essential
challenges. Quite often we encounter very limited data sets of  
heterogeneous
nature including numeric entities as well as subjective expert's  
opinions and
judgments. In this study, we elaborate on the development of models  
of software
processes and software constructs in the framework of Computational
Intelligence (CI), discuss their main features, and demonstrate the  
relevance
of those in quantitative constructs of Software Engineering. In  
particular, we
elaborate on interpretability of models associated inherently with  
the logic
nature of fuzzy set-based architectures. Similarly, it is  
demonstrated how
heterogeneous data can be captured through the mechanisms of  
evolutionary
optimization and learning capabilities residing with the environment of
neurocomputing.

"Imperfect Information in Software Design Processes"
        by Joost Noppen - University of Twente, The Netherlands
----------------------------------------------------------------
The process of designing high-quality software systems is one of the  
major
issues in software engineering research. Over the years, this has  
resulted in
numerous design methods, each with specific qualities and drawbacks.  
Although
the current software methods have largely proven their applicability,
unfortunately they naturally suffer from the existence of imperfect
information.

Imperfection during software design is the occurrence of information,  
which is
uncertain or incomplete to a certain degree. This can have many  
different
causes, such as for instance incomplete information sources or an  
imprecise
view of what the system should do. The existence of imperfection  
makes the
design processes difficult to apply, since such information typically  
has one
or more elements that are ambiguous in their interpretation. When a  
system is
designed by using only one of the possible interpretations, there is  
a risk
that the interpretation turns out to be wrong and the need to  
redesign the
system. Imperfection is an inherent problem of almost every design  
process as
well. But rather than trying to model the imperfection that  
inevitably exists,
imperfection is generally neglected by making explicit and crisp  
assumptions,
which may eventually result in wrong design decisions.

In this presentation, we identify the problems in the two areas in which
imperfect information can manifest itself, namely in contextual  
information
(predominantly requirement specifications) and in software design  
activities.
Based on this, we propose generic extensions to software design  
processes for
modeling imperfect information. In our proposed method we have used  
techniques
from probability theory and fuzzy set theory, to ensure that we  
capture the
relevant properties of the imperfect information.

PANEL
=====

"Improving Architecture Qualities in Industrial Context: Experiences and
Challenges"
Moderator: Prof.dr.ir. Mehmet Aksit, University Of Twente, The  
Netherlands
Panelists:
   dr. ir. Pierre America, Philips Research, The Netherlands
   dr. Pim van den Broek, University of Twente, The Netherlands
   dr. Paul Clements, Software Engineering Institute, United States
   prof. dr. Antony Finkelstein, University College London, United  
Kingdom
   prof. dr. Witold Pedrycz, University of Alberta, Canada
   dr. Awais Rashid, University of Lancaster, United Kingdom

"It is amazing what you can do, if you don't care who gets the credit."
************************************************************************ 
*****
ir. Pascal Dürr                                           [http:// 
flatliner.student.utwente.nl]
PhD candidate, TRESE group                            [http:// 
trese.cs.utwente.nl]
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------------
   Dept. of Computer Science, Faculty EEMCS, University of Twente
       P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------------
@Home: Campuslaan 39-217, 7522 NG, Enschede, The Netherlands
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------------
email:    durr at ewi.utwente.nl
phone:   +31-(0)53-489 4667
fax  :       +31-(0)53-489 3247
cell:        +31-(0)6-45740276
home:    +31-(0)53-4895090
************************************************************************ 
*****

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