Formal Foundations of Software Evolution

13 March 2001
Centro de Congressos do IST
Lisboa, Portugal

Co-located with the European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2001)

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ORGANIZERS

Tom Mens

Programming Technology Lab, Departement Informatica, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

Michel Wermelinger

Departamento de Informática, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

MOTIVATION AND OBJECTIVES

Numerous scientific studies of large-scale software systems have shown that more than 80% of the total cost of software development is devoted to software maintenance. This is mainly due to the fact that software systems are under constant evolution to cope with changing requirements. Today this is more than ever the case, because of the dramatic evolution of technology, the ever changing legislation, etc. Despite this omnipresence of software evolution, existing tools that try to offer support are far from ideal. They are often implemented in an ad-hoc way, are not generally applicable, are not scalable, or they are difficult to integrate with other tools.

The goal of this workshop is to try and find out how formal techniques can alleviate those problems, and how they can lead to tools for large-scale software systems that are more robust and more widely applicable without sacrificing efficiency. Preferably, provided techniques should not be restricted to a particular phase in the software life-cycle, but should be generally applicable throughout the entire software development process.

The following is a non-limitative list of formal approaches that could be used to deal with evolution issues in a general and scalable way:

rewriting-based or transformation-based approaches (e.g., term rewriting and graph rewriting)
declarative reasoning and specification formalisms
logic-based approaches (e.g., temporal logic, predicate logic)
category theory
graph theory
semantics-based approaches (e.g., denotational semantics)
metrics-based approaches

Submissions should make clear how these or other formalisms allow us to build tools that support software developers with solving typical evolution problems of large and complex software systems. These tools should provide support for at least one of the categories below, and preferably for more than one category:

Forward engineering. Techniques to ensure consistency and detect differences between implementation, design, analysis, requirements and software architectures.
Reverse engineering. Techniques to extract relevant abstractions from source code in order to improve understanding of the global structure of a software system.
Re-engineering. Techniques to restructure software (possibly at run-time) in order to improve reusability, extensibility and maintainability (e.g., refactoring, reconfiguration).
Team Engineering. Techniques to support software evolution when multiple developers change software simultaneously (e.g., software merging, versioning).

WORKSHOP PARTICIPATION

Participants will be selected on the basis of a short position paper (3 to 5 pages). This paper should be sent by e-mail to Tom Mens with a CC to Michel Wermelinger. The body of the e-mail should clearly include the authors' names, addresses, affiliations and the paper's title and abstract. The paper should be attached to the mail in pdf or postscript format.

The paper should provide a clear answer to the following questions:

What is the formalism proposed in the paper?
How and why can this formalism be used to provide (better) tool support for evolution?
For which aspects of software evolution can this formalism provide support?
To which part of the software development process is the approach applicable?
How does this formalism allow one to build tools that are more general, more widely applicable, more robust, more scalable, more easy to integrate with other tools, etc.?

After having reviewed the position papers, authors will be informed about whether their position paper is accepted. Note that an important prerequisite for being able to attend the workshop is that participants are also registered as CSMR 2001 participants (www.esw.inesc.pt/csmr2001)!

WORKSHOP FORMAT

All accepted position papers will be made available from the organisers' website. Participants are required to read these papers before the workshop.

From all submitted position papers, a limited number will be selected for an oral presentation during a plenary session. The selection will be made based on those position papers that have the highest potential for generating issues that can stimulate the discussions.

After a discussion on the issues raised during the presentations, participants will be divided in groups to discuss on a number of important questions. By the end of the day, each group should report its findings to the other participants during a final plenary session. Based on these results, a workshop report will be distilled and made available on the organisers' website.

WORKSHOP REPORT

An official technical report containing the position papers of all participants will be prepared and distributed to all participants during the workshop. This report will also be made available from the organisers' website. Additionally, a summary of the workshop will be distilled and be made available as a technical report as well.

Depending on the quality of the submitted position papers, the interest of the participants, and the quest for a publisher, we will also consider publishing a post-workshop proceedings (or rather, "succeedings") with revised versions of the best position papers, taking the comments and suggestions made during the workshop into account.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES

January 15th 2001: Submission of workshop participation.
February 19th 2001: Notification of acceptance.
March 13th 2001: Date of the workshop.

ABOUT THE ORGANISERS

Tom Mens is a postdoctoral fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium) since October 2000. He is associated as a computer science researcher to the Programming Technology Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he finished his PhD on "A Formal Foundation for Object-Oriented Evolution" in September 1999. In 1998 he was part of the ECOOP Organizing Team. His main research interest lies in the use of lightweight formal techniques for improving support for software evolution, and he published several papers on this research topic. In the EMOOSE-programme (European Masters in Object-Oriented Software Engineering), jointly organised by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) and the Ecole des Mines de Nantes (France), he gives an advanced course on object-oriented software evolution.

Michel Wermelinger is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science of the New University of Lisbon, and a researcher at the Laboratory for Computational Models and Architectures of the University of Lisbon. His main research interest is formal foundations of software architecture. For his PhD on "Specification of Software Architecture Reconfiguration" he used rewriting, categorical, and graph techniques. He is the principal investigator of the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation project FAST (Formal Approach to Software Architecture) and a member of the program committee of the International Conference on Software Engineering in 2002.

RELATED WORKSHOPS

ECOOP 2000 Workshop 17 (June 13, 2000. Sophia-Antipolis, France)
Object-Oriented Architectural Evolution
www.emn.fr/borne/ECOOP2000-W17.html

ISPSE 2000 (Nov. 1 & 2, 2000. Kanazawa, Japan)
International Symposium on Principles of Software Evolution
www.jaist.ac.jp/ISPSE/

This workshop is an activity of the Scientific Research Network on "Foundations of Software Evolution",
and is partially financed by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium).