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.

31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) - Conference Report

Last week, I had the chance to participate in the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), in Vancouver, Canada. The conference had a great program composed of research papers, demonstrations, a track related to software engineering in practice (SEIP), a track also about new ideas and emerging results (NIER) and several parallel events such as the 6th International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), the 17th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP).

In these co-located events it is very good to see the growing of the MSR, it is incredible how it is getting attention from the community. On Monday, I spent the day hanging out the area in the morning and having some discussions with others participants. On Tuesday, it was performed the Software Requirements and Design: A Tribute to Michael Jackson, a full day workshop about his contributions in the field. The workshop was very well conducted by Pamela Zave and Bashar Nuseibeh. I believe that this kind of event it is very important to celebrate outstanding researchers working with software engineering. I had the chance to participate in previous ICSEs including the tribute to Barry Boehm. A book with his work similar to Barry Boehm, David Parnas and Vic Basili will be released soon.

On Wednesday, the conference started. The first keynote was Steve McConnell and his talk about: “10 Most Powerful Ideas in Software Engineering”. His presentation was interesting, especially, when he pointed out some ideas with a gauge showing the silly state of each one. His final list was:

1. Software Development Work is Performed by Human Beings.
2. Incrementalism.
3. Iteration.
4. Cost to Fix A Defect Increases Over Time.
5. Important Kernel of Truth in the Waterfall Model.
6. Software Estimation Can be Improved Over Time.
7. The Most Powerful Form of Reuse is Full Reuse.
8. Risk Management Provides Critical Insights into Many Core Software Development Issues. 9. Different Kinds of Software Call for Different Kinds of Software Development.
10. SWEBOK.

After Steve’s talk started the research papers and I had to run and switch among different rooms and sessions. In this day, I decided to see the following papers:

• Tesseract: Interactive Visual Exploration of Socio-Technical Relationships in Software Development; and
  
• Succession: Measuring Transfer of Code and Developer Productivity.

Next, I participated in NIER session with interesting new ideas and the SCORE competition by student teams. In this competition, Brazil was there with a team from UFPE, congrats, guys and Prof. Jaelson Castro their coach! In the end of the day, we had a small dinner with the conference members. It was good to talk a little bit more and meet others students and professors from Brazilian universities.

On Thursday, Carlo Ghezzi was the second keynote speaker with the theme: “Reflections on Forty-Plus Years of Software Engineering Researched Observed Through ICSE: An Insider’s View”. His presentation was very good with several data, charts, discussing what we produced, how to measure it, lessons learned and how to improve our current scenario. It was awesome!!

After that, I started to switch again among several presentations and I ended up with the following list:

• Reasoning About Edits to Feature Models
• How We Refactor, and How We Know It (Winner of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Papers Award)
• The Secret Life of Bugs: Going Past the Errors and Omissions in Software Repositories
• Discovering and Representing Systematic Code Changes.

Still in this day, we had discussion about Software Engineering for the Planet and Reflecting on Development Processes in the Video Game Industry. Finally, the paper N Degrees of Separation: Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns was presented and won the the most influential paper award.

On Friday, Pamela Zave was the last keynote and presented Software Engineering for the Next Internet. After Pamela’s talk, I participated in a session on Multicore Software Engineering and saw some challenges in the area and other papers such as:

• Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista (Winner of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Papers Award); and
  
• How to Avoid Drastic Software Process Change (using Stochastic Stability), and
• Do Code Clones Matter?.

It was the report about this ICSE.

Next year, see you in South Africa.

P.S: I did not see the keynote presentations on the website. However, all the keynotes sent me it after my request. So, try it too.

One more Unforgettable RiSE Day

On November 26th, we had at C.E.S.A.R one more RiSE Day. This special workshop was composed of many discussions involving too many different issues in software reuse. In this edition, we had invited participants:Klaus Schmid, Kyo Kang, Rob Ommering, and Michalis Anastasopoulos.

The great agenda started with an overview about RiSE Labs and continued with the presentations about product lines, service-oriented product lines, bug triage and rise tools. Every year, I believe that this workshop is getting better.

Thanks for all the students and the invited participants for valuable feedback and patience.

12th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC) - Conference Report

Last week, during September 8-12, in Limerick, Ireland, was held the 12th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC). The conference put together more than 220 researchers and practitioners from several places around the world interested in several issues about software product lines.

In the first day, initial ideas were discussed in four workshops approaching Dynamic Software Product Lines (a mix from adaptive systems, middleware and SPL ideas), Aspect Oriented and SPL (conducted by Vander Alves and his colleagues), Service-Oriented Architectures and Software Product Lines and Software Product Line Testing. In my opinion, these workshops discussed current hot topics in the field with some ones more consolidated than others. For example, the community does not have a common understanding about Dynamic Software Product Lines yet. On the other hand, some areas such as testing and AOP start to be more concrete with the integration. In addition, some tutorials were also important to disseminate the topic.

On Tuesday, we had the first keynote speaker: David Parnas. David started discussing his inspiration with the Fred Brooks’ work, and discussed his brilliant ideas about program families and other experiences. His talk was titled Multi-Dimensional Software Families: Document Defined Partitions of a Set of Products. David also discussed about the importance of documentation in software development. Another remarkable moment was his warning about the paper counting process, it was very important. David said that one important point in his papers is that it is still applicable today and makes total sense [This book is a compilation of his work. I strongly recommend it.].
For me, it was special because one day before I was introduced to him by David Weiss. I did not have much time to talk to him but it is very good when you have the opportunity to meet someone that was inspiration in the field for you. David said about his experience in Brazil years ago and other points. My first advice here is to carry on your camera all the time. [I did not have my camera there]. After the talk, David left the conference. Actually, I would like to see him more around.

Next, the sessions were started in parallel. The first one, involving feature models and the second one: SPL experiences. I decided attendant for the second one and it was good. Experiences in banks, automotive and embedded were presented. In this section, Dirk Muthig and his colleagues from Fraunhofer Institute showed their two experiences. Closing the sessions, time for lunch and discussing SPL with different people. In the afternoon sessions, information retrieval and clustering were integrated to discover product lines requirements. At the same time, it was started a panel with experts on scoping. I decided to keep my focus on the first area but I would like to see the second too. During the last sessions, after coffee, I decided to do a merge and saw a presentation about clone detection and SPL and switched for the other room to participate in a good discussion about the SPL roots and its foundations in the software reuse (during the Software Productivity Consortium) area by Grady Campbell. In the end of the day, we went to a reception in a pub with music, food and few of the Irish culture.

On Wednesday, the second keynote speaker, Luc Koch from Phillips Medical System, presented their experience in Phillips Healthcare discussing the past, present and future of this effort. Next, the sessions started and I had to decide again which one to attendant. I did a good choice and DSL and Code Generation was widely discussed. In the afternoon, I participated in a working session about the possible integration between Agile and SPL. It was very good and you can see the summary here. Finally, we ended up in the conference dinner in Irish castle. It was awesome with wine, dance, music, food and more wine.

On Thursday, the conference started with an industrial panel leaded by Charlie Krueger and other companies discussing their experiences in the field. It showed different views and impressions by the companies with different levels of expertise. After the panel, the sessions started and I participated in one about Service-Oriented Product Lines. It was very good but we can see that we have too much room for research in this direction.

After that, it was time to see some tools demo and participated in the Product Line Hall of Fame conducted by David Weiss and Paul Clements. That was awesome. The ceremony is very good with perfect sound, video, lights and sure, their presentation. Everybody loved it. Two companies were nominated. The first one was conducted by Krueger.

In the last day, we have another good agenda with some tutorials, workshops and the Doctoral Symposium. I decided to participate in the last one for two reasons: the first one because I will be the Doctoral Symposium chair in the next year, and the second one, because I was interested in seeing the new research in the field and the future new researchers. The session was conducted by Klaus Schmid and had four presentations discussing since agile and SPL until testing and aspect. The good point here was to see one work from Brazil there. After that, the conference finished.

In summary, the conference was very good with people from industry and academy from different countries, with new ideas, tools and important experiences. Next year, I hope see you in San Francisco, California.

Get the call for papers here.

34th IEEE EUROMICRO Conference

During the last week, from September 3rd to 5th, the 34th IEEE EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications was held in Parma, Italy. Two papers from RiSE group have been accepted for the conference: the first is entitled “A Case Study in Software Product Lines – The Case of the Mobile Game Domain”, from Leandro Nascimento, Eduardo Almeida and Silvio Meira; the other one is entitled “InCoME: Integrated Cost Model for Product Line Engineering”, Jarley Nobrega, Eduardo Almeida and Silvio Meira. I had the pleasure to attend to the conference and present both papers.

The conference was composed of keynote speeches and special sessions including regular papers, work in progress and posters (see the program here).

The keynote speeches were held in the mornings and the special sessions in the afternoons, handling different topics and bringing great discussions among the participants. My presentation was held in the first day of the conference, September 3rd, in the Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) track. Two special sessions occurred in this first day: Services and Product Lines. In this last special session, I presented firstly the Jarley’s work followed by my work. During both presentations relevant questions and suggestions came up contributing significantly to the progress of both works. At the end of the day, a welcome cocktail was served in the Palazzo Sanvitale, giving the participants the opportunity to taste a typical Parmesan Cheese.

In the second day of EUROMICRO conference, I participated in two special sessions in the CBSE track: OSGi and Embedded Systems. As it was not a surprise, OSGi has got one dedicated special session as it is considered the new buzzword in academia in aspects related to Component-Based Development (CBD). As the technology is being applied in different context in practice, the three works in OSGi session presented practical solutions for real problems involving bundle updates, resource monitoring in OSGi-based components and OSGi stale references. In the sequence, the Embedded Systems session included papers describing techniques for CBD in the embedded systems context. At the end of the day, we attended to a concert by Corale Verdi, a world famous chorus specialized in opera pieces, followed by a social dinner at Cavallino Bianco.

In the last day of conference, I attended to a special session also in CBSE track named Component Models. Topics related to Model-Driven Development (MDD) and compositional CBD for embedded systems were covered in this special session.

It is very grateful to see the academia recognition of RiSE’s work in different conferences around the world as you could see in older posts in this blog. I hope to see many other posts like this written by conference attendees from RiSE group.

2nd RiSS - RiSE Summer School on Software Product Lines

Hello, Folks! We proudly would like to announce the 2nd RiSS - RiSE Summer School on Software Product Lines. Based on the success from the last edition, this year, we have another edition of the conference. In the previous one, we discussed several technical and non-technical issues of software reuse. This year, the topic is Software Product Lines considered the key approach to achieve large-scale reuse. In this year, we have specialist from different countries discussing software product lines introduction, requirements engineering in software product lines, software product line architectures, software product line implementation and software product lines evolution.

We have too many discussions to choose the topics and the lecturers from academia and industry and we believe that it will be awesome. Be fast and take your seat because there are just 100 ones. In addition, you will have the opportunity to enjoy the summer in Recife with several attractions.

See you there!

3rd Workshop for Introducing Reuse in Enterprises (WIRE)

As posted before in this blog, during June 27-28 happened the 3rd Workshop for Introducing Reuse in Enterprises (WIRE) in Recife, Brazil. The workshop was composed of tutorials, panels, keynotes, and a lot of discussions (see the program here). Key researchers working on the topic were there, such as Jan Bosch (VP, Engineering Process Intuit Inc., EUA) and Paulo Merson (Software Engineering Institute, USA).
During these days, the main topic in discussion was Software Product Lines. Jan Bosch (here and here) talked a lot about his experience in Software Product Lines adoption in industry, the main problems, the benefits, the big challenges, his maturity model for SPL. At the end of the first day, professor Paulo Borba (UFPE) presented an industrial report about a big project involving several institutions and a Game Mobile company addressed to implement a product line in the game mobile domain. The results were very interesting and the opportunity to see something closer to us was very important for the attendance. Moreover, in the first day we had other two industrial reports regarding reuse in industry. In the first one, Eduardo Cruz talked about RiSE's solutions to improve the productivity in software development, covering process, methods and tools. In the second one, Eliseu Santos talked about the CPM Braxis experience in adopt reuse in it software development process, the main problems, the business decisions related to reuse practices, and the solutions adopted to face these challenges.

In the second day was held the Industrial Panel, where the attendance asked the guests about everything related to reuse adoption, software product lines challenges, legal aspects related to software reuse, non technical decision, etc. The panel was formed by Eduardo Almeida (RiSE), Eliseu Santos (CPM Braxis), Jan Bosh (Intuit Inc.), Paulo Adeodato (Neurotech) and was moderated by Eduardo Cruz (RiSE). After the painel, Paulo Merson started his talk about Service-Oriented Architecture for Quality-Oriented Architects, a practical information for the creation and evaluation of the architecture of an SOA system was discussed. Next, Paulo Merson discussed important questions to how to document product lines architectures using UML 2.0 and other solutions.
If you did not have the opportunity to be there, the workshop pictures and presentations are available in the WIRE web site. If you were there, it is time to remember more.

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.

An Approach to Measurement Java Code Quality in a Reuse Environment

A reuse environment was defined by [Frakes, 1994] as an environment where process and tools give support for activities that are important to build components with/for reuse. According to [Griss, 1994], a repository is one of the most important elements in a reuse environment. However, the quality of the assets on the repository had been questionable according to the type of reuse model adopted.

We are thinking about a reuse model where anyone can store assets on the repository without previous analysis. In this model, we have a low reliability about the reusable assets because anyone can store assets and who will reuse don’t have assets' quality assurance. In this model, the main problems are low reliability and a concern about code problems propagation.

We are developing an approach that can minimize these problems. In this approach, the repository can check the stored assets' quality according to metrics. For this initial stage, we are considering a repository where are stored only Java code. Thus, to develop this approach we accomplish the main steps: (i) investigate code metrics that can be used; (ii) select quality attributes; and (iii) quality attributes measurement.

In the first step, we made a time line about software code metrics and selected a set of metrics that can be used in our approach. We analyzed ten metrics groups and we were selecting the metrics according the following criteria: applicable for Java code; there are researche reporting about empiric validation; there are a consistent theoretical validation; and the metrics have a good acceptance, in other words, they were implemented in the analyzed metrics tools. The selected metrics were LOC, Cyclomatic Complexity [McCabe, 1976] and Chindamber and Kemerer metrics [Chidamber, 1994].

The second step was to select what type of quality attributes would be quantified in our approach. We selected the Maintainability quality attribute described in ISO 9126. In the third step, we made a relationship between each quality attribute of Maintainability and a set of metrics selected that can quantify these attributes. So, this approach can quantify a set of quality attributes using code metrics.

The next stage in this work is to integrate the approach automation in a reuse environment. Thus, we want to analyze if the retrieved component's quality is better, and if it is possible this approach to reduce the reuse of low quality code. We believe the main contribution of this research is to introduce a little bit of the quality analysis responsibility of the reusable assets also to the repository. Thus, we can have more reliability in a reuse environment without a certification process for stored assets on the repository, moreover it can reduce the cost to introduce reuse in a begging stage.

3rd Workshop for Introducing Reuse in Enterprises (WIRE)

During June 27-28 in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil will be performed the 3rd Workshop for Introducing Reuse in Enterprises (WIRE). This workshop is inspired in a previous successful one: the Annual Workshop on Institutionalizing Software Reuse (WISR). WIRE will join together researchers and practitioners working with software reuse.

The workshop is composed of talks, tutorials, and panels. This year, Jan Bosch and Hassan Gomma will be the keynotes. The workshop is the right place to discuss practical software reuse. If you have time, combine the workshop with the São João in Caruaru one of the biggest party around the world. After the workshop, this blog will present a summary.

10th International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR) – Final Feedback

As I posted before in this blog, last week happened the International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR) in Beijing, China. The conference was composed of tutorials, workshops, doctoral symposium, demo tools, and regular papers (see the program here). The key researchers working on the topic were there.

The main discussion during the ICSR involved search and retrieval and its related issues, architectures for reuse, COST, and several aspects of product lines (variability, domain analysis, feature interaction, technologies, and quality). Finally, two points should be highlighted: services starting to be discussed also in software reuse and empirical studies in the area. These two points are important: first, it is interesting to see some work investigating the [real] possibility of services work well in the reuse scenario; second, empirical results indicate that the field is each more becoming more mature with solid evaluations.

By the way, in this conference, the RiSE Labs presented two papers related to model-driven reuse and our repository system. In addiction, the RiSE business unit presented two of our products in the tools session.

The next ICSR will be in 2010. So far, we do not know where the conference will be hosted. When it was known, this blog will announce.

10th International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR) – Initial Feedback

Yesterday, (May 25, 2008) started the main reuse conference around the world. The initial day started with the Doctoral Symposium. In this symposium, coordinated by Greg Kulczycki (Virginia Tech) with the participation of Bill Frakes (Virginia Tech) and I, three Ph.D. students received feedback from their research related to quality improvement, formal methods and agents. The main issue in this symposium was the lack of the big picture during the presentations. The students had difficulties to explain clearly the main points: the problem, the state-of-the-art, and their proposal. However, I believe that the feedback received will be useful.

In the afternoon, we had the IV RESAFE: International Workshop on Software Reuse and Safety coordinated by Bill Frakes and Jonh Favaro. In this workshop, Bill, John, Dirk Muthig, Greg and I had good discussions about contracts, certification, safety, reliability. John presented his experience with automobile projects in Europe while Bill and Greg discussed their point of views related to Therac accident and contracts respectively. I explained a little about experience with component certification and Dirk showed some directions related to the KobrA approach. After the conference, Bill and John will write a summary about the workshop. By the way, the day was good to meet other researchers such as Ruben-Prieto and Wayne Lim who was presenting his awarded tutorial at RiSS in the ICSR.

30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) - 40 years of Software Engineering

About forty years ago, it was started the main conference about Software Engineering. In that time, during the first NATO Software Engineering Conference this incredible field was starting. There, researchers such as E.W. Dijkstra (in memorian), Alan J. Perlis (in memorian), Peter Naur, Brian Randell, M. Douglas McIlroy, were discussing about the Software Crisis and new approaches as Software Reuse our main focus here.

40 years after, the country is the same, Germany, and many of that people will be there to celebrate the 40 years of Software Engineering, including M. Douglas McIlroy. See the Software Components Lecture by M.D. McIlroy.

If you have the opportunity sure go there. May 10-18, 2008, Leipzig, Germany (30th ICSE).

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.

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.

The First Historical RiSE Day

Can you imagine an internal workshop with Bill Frakes, Dirk Muthig, Ivica Crnkovic, Wayne Lim, and Ruben Prieto-Diaz with several discussions about search and retrieval, software product lines, reuse tools, repository bugs, and software reuse at all?

If your answer was yes, that is it. It was the RiSE Day which happened on November, 29, 2007. It was incredible with different point of views and exciting talks with the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. students in RiSE.

Thanks for all the students and the keynotes for valuable feedback and patience. See all the pictures and presentations here.

XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES)

Last week I participated in the XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES) in João Pessoa, Paraíba. The event had several technical sessions, presentations, tutorials and panels in different software engineering areas. Furthermore, the SBES 2007 had workshops and the tools session, in which the RiSE Group were represented by two tools: ToolDAy – a tool that aids the domain analyst during the process, providing documentation, model views, consistency checker and reports generation. And also by the LIFT – which extracts knowledge from legacy systems source code, in order to aid the analyst in understanding the system’s requirements.

Among other activities, the SBES had a panel with RiSE group coordinator Silvio Meira (C.E.S.A.R and Federal University of Pernambuco), Don Batory (University of Texas), David Rosenblum (University College London), Claudia Werner (COPPE/ Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and Itana Gimenes (State University of Maringá) about Academic and Industrial Cooperation in Software Engineering. The panel rose questions about why there is so little cooperation between them, and how it can be improved. In this panel the LIFT tool was cited several times as a successful example of cooperation between Academy (Federal University of Pernambuco) and Industry (C.E.S.A.R and Pitang Software Factory)

Extracting and Evolving Mobile Games Product Lines

We had a discussion about a paper published in the SPLC 2005 with the title: “Extracting and Evolving Mobile Games Product Lines”. This is an interesting paper which describes a practical approach of software product lines involving Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). The author describes a scenario with three different mobile games, and, using AOP, extracted aspects from the code. He based his idea in the fact that mobile applications usually have crosscutting concerns related to hardware restrictions and different features from one handset to another such as, screen size, pixel depth, API restrictions, etc. So, this scenario would be well managed by using AOP. The article also defines some rules for code refactoring to obtain the aspects and suggests a manner to maintain the traceability between features and aspects. Other works tried to implement the same idea of the one mentioned, but the challenging scenario of mobile applications makes it pioneer.

The biggest problem involving SPL and the mobile domain is possibly the chaos involved with the platform. We commonly see different manufacturers implementing the same platform in two different ways. Or there are processing restrictions that make the platform implementation to work differently from the specification. It seems that the mobile application domain is still in chaos because the market share rivalry and the run for lower prices are most important than establishing a standard platform for applications amongst manufacturers.

My opinion is: in a short period of time, handsets computing power will be enough to establish a SPL with the same sophistication of a SPL applied to desktop applications. And then, the major problems we face now with mobile domain will vanish and the problems will be related for any domain chosen.

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?”