35th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications

On last week, between 27-29 August, it was run the 12th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD) and the 35th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) 2009.

Both conferences took place at the Cultural and Conference Center, in the University of Patras. The event put togther research from various places of the world. All of them interested in discussing new ideas, such work in progress, and concluded work. The RiSE group was represented by Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti, in the SEAA 2009 sessions, where he presented three works from the group, as follows:

1 - Martins, A. C; Garcia, V. C.; Almeida, E. S.; Meira, S. R. L. Suggesting Software Components for Reuse in Search Engines Using Discovered Knowledge Techniques, 35th IEEE EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), Service and Component Based Software Engineering (SCBSE) Track, Patras, Greece, 2009.

2 - Neiva, D. F. S; Almeida, E. S.; Meira, S. R. L. An Experimental Study on Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines, 35th IEEE EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), Service and Component Based Software Engineering (SCBSE) Track, Short Paper, Patras, Greece, 2009.

3 - Silva, F. R. C; Almeida, E. S.; Meira, S. R. L. A Component Testing Approach Supported by a CASE Tool, 35th IEEE EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), Service and Component Based Software Engineering (SCBSE) Track, Short Paper, Patras, Greece, 2009.

The paper "A Component Testing Approach Supported by a CASE Tool" was presented in the SCBSE: Component-based Systems Correctness and Test session. In conjunction with this work, several other articles were presented , showing really interesting approaches.

The paper "Suggesting Software Components for Reuse in Search Engines Using Discovered Knowledge Techniques" was presented in the session SCBSE: Experiences and Applications. And th paper "An Experimental Study on Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines" was showed in the session SPPI: Empirical Approaches.

All the work presented were very interesting. People showed a lot of new ideas to solve the most well know problems regarding SCBSE, and the importance of the empirical approaches session should be emphasized, since there is a lack of well made empirical validation in most of CS work.

Oh, we had also a very amazing gala dinner organized by the Euromicro committee, in front of a very beautiful beach. There we could taste really nice Greek food, and it was also possible to see some Greek dance and to listen Greek music. Really nice!!!

The next Euromicro will take place on Lilly, France. I hope to see you there.

20th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE)

Last week, in San Francisco, California, I participated in the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE). The conference this year had roughly 120 attendants from more than 30 countries. During these three days, the conference discussed several aspects related to software engineering and knowledge engineering. In special, important topics were related to neural networks in software development (prediction systems), clone detection, component selection approaches, and product lines.

In this conference, the main drawback was the number of parallel tracks (3-4). On the other hand, the good point was the number of accepted papers from Brazil. There, the RiSE Labs presented a paper entitled: A Systematic Process for Domain Engineering discussing how to create family of reusable assets in a specific domain.

21st IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T)

Last week, I participated in a good conference the 21st IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T). I said good because in this conference there was 3rd Academy for Software Engineering Educators & Trainers (ASEE&T). I did not know both and especially the second was incredible. Incredible because we have lectures with Barry Boehm, Victor Basili e Dieter Rombach. That was very nice. The slides are there. You can see it.

About CSEE&T, it was very good also. It is a good conference to discuss about software engineering education and training in general. There, we had discussions about games in software engineering, agiles and formal methods, etc. The keynote speakers included Bertrand Meyer and Watts Humphrey.

I was there presenting part of our experience teaching software reuse with the paper: A Case Study in Software Product Lines: An Educational Experience. It, in general, was well received by the software engineering education community with some questions. Next year, the conference will be in India.

ACM/SAC 2008 Impressions

The ACM/SAC 2008 was held at Fortaleza-CE, Brazil from March, 16th until 20th. The conference achieved the record of 500 participants from 75 different countries participating and discussing the state-of-the-art in computer science. The track sessions ran in five rooms simultaneously during all day with free access for anyone who intends to participate. The most interaction among the participants, however, was observed during the poster sessions due to the fact that they were more relaxed and less formal. The Information Access and Retrieval Track (IAR), in particular, presented many interesting works mainly concerned in the relevance of the searches. Most of works have showed the use of adjacent technologies for increasing the semantics of their mechanisms such as latent semantic analysis, semantic web resources, term selection analysis and the use of location-based spatial queries. Although the track sessions joined people interested in the specific topic of research, at night, dinners contributed for creating a very pleasant atmosphere where participants could narrow relationships and implement the “true” network. In spite of this conference had been considered the biggest one in the history of ACM, a negative point was evidenced by the number of absences, in general, 25% of authors per session did not appear for their presentations, maybe due to the high cost of the flight to Brazil. On the other hand, it was great to see how research in Brazil is well-known and respected abroad. Next year, ACM/SAC 2009 will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. See you there !

These impressions were shared with my roommates Márcio Ribeiro, advised by Paulo Borba (UFPE) and Rodrigo Teixeira, advised by Augusto Sampaio (UFPE). Both also had poster and paper accepted in the conference.

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society - Special Issue on Software Reuse

Today was published the new issue the Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society (JBCS). In this special issue the focus was Software Reuse: Methods, Processes, Tools and Experiences. The guest editors were me, and the professors Silvio Meira and Bill Frakes.

The call for this special issue attracted 15 submissions and the papers were reviewed by at least three reviewers. Based on the reviewers’ recommendations, 4 papers were finally accepted, which corresponds to a relevant acceptance rate that reflects the high quality of the papers in this special issue. The papers involve aspects related to software component, software product lines and quality in software reuse.

You can see the free digital version here.

7th IEEE International Conference on Composition-Based Software Systems (ICCBSS)

Today, it was finished the 7th International Conference on Composition-Based Software Systems (ICCBSS), hosted in Madrid, Spain, during February, 25-29. The conference which had about 80 attendants from university and industry had as the main keynote speakers the notorious professor Ian Sommerville and the distinguished software engineer at IBM, Alan Brown.

The conference discussed issues related to interoperability, methods to systems adaptation, customiation, testing and secutiry, besides exploring strongly Service-Oriented Computing, especially, Service-Oriented Architecture. In his talk, Alan Brown approached it with the talk "Practical Approaches to Delivering Service-Oriented Solutions: The Role of Software Architects and Architecture in an SOA World" highlighting the current state-of-the-practice, the RUP update for SOA, and some specific techniques used there. Alan experience on the topic was very exciting. As a friend said it is incredible to hear a software engineer talking about his experience, results and challengers.

In the conference, the RiSE was represented with a paper about Domain Implementation in Software Product Lines using OSGi which showed our initial experience with this technology in the field of product lines as a structured method.

By the way, an important topic which I would like to highlight is the hype on Service-Oriented Computing. Last week, I had a small meeting with some researchers and students at Virginia Tech University and this aspect was also discussed from different point of views including reuse. At RiSE this topic is also being explored with methods and systematic ways to perform it. We hope in the future post more discussions about it especially related to reuse which is starting to happen.

For the interested, the next conference will be in U.S. on February. So put it in your agenda.

No Evolution on SE?

Two weeks ago I have participated in the EUROMICRO CONFERENCE on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) which was held on August 27-31, in Lübeck, Germany. Since 2005 I have participated in this Conference (2005 was held in Porto/Portugal and 2006 was held in Dubronick/Croatia).

This conference has a very interesting public from a set of software companies, such as Philips, Nokia, Sony/Ericsson, HP, among others and a set of recognizable institutes like Fraunhofer Institute, Finland Research, C.E.S.A.R., among others. In this way, interesting discussions and partnerships (with the industry and academia) usually takes place.

I have presented two papers there: (1) a paper about software component maturity model, in which I described the component quality model and the evaluation techniques proposed by our group in order to achieve a quality degree in software components; (2) a paper about an experimental study on domain engineering, which was an interesting work accomplished by our group together with the university in order to evaluate a domain engineering process at a post-graduate course. Some researchers that watched those presentations believe the component certification is the future of software components and like the work that we have been developing because this area is vague, sometimes. On the other hand, the researchers liked the experimental study report and commented that this is an interesting area that could be improved in order to increase the number of proved and validated works (in academia or industry) in software engineering area. The experimental engineering area has received a special attention in the last years by the software engineering community due to the lack of works and the difficulty to evaluate the software researches.

A very interesting keynote speech was given by Ralf Reussner who started his presentation with the question presented on the title of this post (No Evolution on SE?). He told that since NATO Conference (the first Software Engineering Conference) we have seen the same questions/problems in the Software Engineering Conferences around the world like software project management problems, requirements changes, software project risks/mitigation, software reuse aspects, among others. Thus, the problems continue to be presented and discussed until nowadays.

Additionally, an interesting topic pointed out by Ralf Reussner is why we don’t have any books from other areas like “Heart Transplantation in 21 Days” or “Nuclear Weapons for Dummies”. So, in our area the science/engineering is not considered like other sciences/engineering. Perhaps this is the reason why we have been discussing since 1968 until now the same problems and questions about software engineering. And the question remains… “No evolution on SE?”