First International Software Technology Exchange Workshop

Swedsoft arranges a workshop in Stockholm on Wednesday 23 Novemeber. It is dedicated to transfer academic results to industry. Sounds really interesting.

First International Software Technology Exchange Workshop 2011

WICSA 2011

I was at WICSA last week. I am a lousy trendspotter, but here is what I have seen as “trends” so far:

There seems to be several efforts, especially on the tool side, that focuses on capturing and navigating architectural information. Is this a sign that architecture information is getting bigger and bigger and is distributed among different sources/artefacts? I thought one of the tangible deliverables from an architect was a comprehensive documentation/model/wiki/whatever with architecture information. As a contrast there wa a tutorial the last day by George Fairbanks on writing a 1-page architecture document. I would say this was a highlight of the conference, to bad most people had gone home by then.

In general it seems architects are more aware of the need to adopt to agile development. I don’t think there is any contradiction, contrary I believe that it is necessary for agile developers to be more aware of “architectural thinking” and what benefits there is of having an explicitly defined architecture. But I do agree that often architecture is the same as Big Upfront Design. At the panel debate I understood better the historical background; many of the originators of the agile manifesto were active developers already in the late eighties and nineties when a lot of focus where on software design. people who started as developers in the last decade don’t have that background and think that the last years focus on process is all that is necessary for developing good software.

There was some discussions  on architecture-based testing (this is a good strategy to define a new research area, combine two or more buzzwords), but it was confusing. some people seemed to mean an architecture where it was easy to verify the quality attributes it was designed to achieve. others seemed to mean an architecture for a systems that was easy to test for testers. I like the latter better, and hope there will emerge more patterns for this than the general patterns of encapsulation etc.

Compared to the last WICSA in 2009 I think the acceptance rate was much higher, above 40%. I think this could be one explanation to why some papers had a rather weak scientific methodology. One other thing I did not like at all were some studies based on industrial practice where the results were too polished. if you present a case study you should include all the small (and big) problems that occur in real settings, otherwise the cases are not of more interest than textbook examples.

Do you use model based development?

I heard an interesting keynote speech from Jon Whittle this morning with the title The Truth About Model-Driven Development: Who's doing it, how and why?
He presented some findings on experiences from using model-based development in industry from the EA-MDE project. I talked to him afterwards and there apparently had only been one automotive company in the study, and I personally think that the conclusions might have been different if they were more data from them. If you are working model-based in your company and want to participate in the study you can do so by answering the questionare on the project web site.
One benefit of model-based development which I expected to see in the study was that it allows domain experts to actually do implementation, for example can chassis control experts actually do code for use in ECUs.
Note: You can substitue model-based development with several other acronyms and Jon's study is still relevant; MDD, MBSE, MDA, ...

I find this study to be similar to what Sascha Kirstan is working on in the automotive industry. I participated in Sascha's study this spring and just got a report with preliminary results, which I haven't had the time to read yet. I sure hope these two researcher will look at each others result and see if they can corroborate their findings or if they are contradictions.

Jon concluded his talk with the top ten tips for companies wanting to adopt model-based development and here they are (but to truly utilise them you must know a lot more about the context where they were found):

1. Keep the domains (modelled, I assume) tight and narrow.
2. Target well known domains.
3. Put MDD on the critical path (he means that pilot projects never get sufficient attention and resources).
4. MDD works best form the ground up.
5. Be careful of gains that are offset elsewhere.
6. Don't obsess about code generation.
7. Not everyone can think abstractly.
8. Most projects fail at scale-up
9. Match tolls and processes to the way people think, not the other way around
10. Ok, there was only 9...

Software product line engineering

Software product line engineering is apparently about modelling variants and achieving formalism in feature descriptions. This is the conclusion I make after attending some workshops and the first morning sessions at the 14th International Software Product Line Conference in Jeju, Korea.
I presented an interesting  paper together with Håkan from Scania of how architects work with maintaining and updating existing architectures over time in the automotive industry. And we did not get a single question!
Last year when I presented another case study everybody was interested in the case and wanted to hear more from industry, but this time it didn't seem to interest the audience.
I find it quite difficult to find venues to present research based on industrial experience and not theoretical examples.

Besides that, I find the notion of feature used in many presentations different from what I am used to. To me a feature is something which is discernible for the end user, same as the definition found in the original work here. For example an adaptive cruise control is a marketable feature in a vehicle. But if I would model that similar to feature modelling prevailing here the model would consist of an optional radar, a compulsory engine, compulsory brake, etc.This means a much higher degree of knowledge about the realisation of features.

The future of software architecture research?

There are two areas which I judge to be of great interest to the industry regarding architecture, and I see very little interest from academia

First, how much effort should be put into architecting? In industry there never are unlimited man-power and indefinite time plans. So how do you know that you have done enough architecting? Or did too many people working with the architecture for a too long time? Or when are the gains in putting another man-hour too small to make it worthwhile?

Second, how to define an architecture based on imperfect premises? In practice the architects never have the full picture. There might be requirements missing, stakeholders unavailable or implicit constraints. Similarly the architects themselves are no super-humans, there will be inconsistencies in what they do, things forgotten, lack of crucial knowledge or personal biases, all which cause an imperfect architecture.

Personally I think that these two areas are more important from an industrial viewpoint than further software architecture research on Architecture Description Languages, formal methods or Service Oriented Architectures (the latter may be contested, but I think I am not alone).

At the 4th European Conference on Software Architecture the workshop in imperfect architecture was cancelled, probably due to too little interest (I heard only 3 papers were submitted). On the other hand I found 7 papers when I scanned the LNCS proceedings which in their title relates to the subjects above.
I don't find this very promising. Eoin Woods had a similar conclusion on the state of software architecture research at his ECSA talk when talking about the relationship between code and other design information, such as architecture, where he thought the academic research and the industrial needs are diverging and not converging.

You can also read this related column from IEEE Software: The Top 10 Burning Research Questions from Practitioners. Especially #4 "Architecture and agile—how much design is enough for different classes of problem?" should get more attention at software architecture conferences.

A colleague of mine at Volvo had an interesting proposition: Since software engineering as a dsiciplin comes from the practitioners the research community wants to keep some distance, in contrast to the "fundamental" researchers in e.g. physics who would be enthusiastic if somebody is interested in applying their theories.

ECSA 2010 pt3

The conference had three interesting keynote speakers: Jan Bosch, Philippe Kruchten and Jim Webber.

It must be quite nice to be a keynote speaker, then you have the authority of making statements like "Control is an expensive illusion causing inefficiency in the system" (JB) or "When ever you hear Service-Oriented Architecture think of orange men in rubber suits coming to rescue you" (JW) without having to prove them scientifically. Convincing and entertaining statements nevertheless.
Philippe Kruchten's keynote was a summary of the tutorial he gave together with Paris Avgeriou. The slides for both are available on-line.

ECSA 2010 pt2

I did not find this year's conference as inspiring as last year's in Cambridge. I don't know why. I think both the quality of the presentation and the gap on what was presented to industrial application varied more.
There are some papers which I plan to re-read, for example

• Lightweight and Continuous Architecture Software Quality Assurance using the aSQA Technique, on how to to architecture analysis in agile-type development.
• Experiences in Making Architectural Decisions during the Development of a New Base Station Platform
• Unifying Software Architecture with its Implementation, on the need to include architectural documentation in what actually gets maintained, i.e. the code
• Structuring Very Large Domain Models, if you think you have big models see what was studied here...
• Towards a Process Maturity Model for Evolutionary Architecting of Embedded System Product Lines, interesting but also similar to Knowit's Architecture Capability Evaluation.

The last three papers were all from the industry track (which also included the presentation by myself), which I thought was as interesting as the rest of the conference together. For some reason the industry track papers was not published by Springer in their LNCS series, but I was told they would be available at the ACM digital library.

ECSA 2010 pt1

I'm at the 4th European Conference on Software Architecture in Copenhagen. The presentations varies, both in presentation skills, scientific rigour and relevance (at least to me).

Jan Bosch stressed 3 key take-aways in his keynote last morning, he might post the presentation on his homepage:

1. An increase in speed trumps any increase in efficiency
2. Software engineering is moving from integration to composition
3. Software architecture is the key to delightful products in software eco-systems

I'm not convinced that all of his conclusions are valid outside of pure software business domains. But I guiess there are som things to learn even if one makes software for systems like cars, communication satellites etc.

Now I'm of to listen to Philippe Kruchten.

ICSE 2011

The International Conference of Software Enginering is on Hawaii in 2011. Deadline for the main research track is Friday 20 August 2010. Time to hurry if I want to submit something...

Yet another article

The blog is updated on a very irregular basis. the main reason is that I presently have 3 articles in the pipeline and this takes priority over anything else. The latest article which I need to update is to ECSA 2010:

Dear AUTHORS,

Unfortunately your paper has not been accepted 'as it is' for inclusion in the program of the 4th European Conference on Software Architecture 2010 (ECSA 2010), which will be held on August 23-26 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

However, the program committee felt that the work reported in your paper has a number of interesting ideas, hence, I would like to invite you to prepare a shortened version of your paper for inclusion as "Emerging research" category Paper in the ECSA 2010 proceedings. As noted on the conference website, the "Emerging research" papers (8 pages of Springer formating) present promising achievements from work-in-progress and are intended to stimulate discussion related to ideas and experiences. For further details about the "Emerging research" papers, plesae visit ECSA 2010 website (http://www.ecsa2010.org). To accommodate publication schedules, final papers must be submitted by June 11, 2010.

... snip ...


4. The camera ready copy of your paper is due by June 11, 2010 (This is a hard deadline!).

... snip ...

Once again, congratulations on having your paper accepted as an "Emerging research" paper. We look forward to receiving your final camera ready paper, and to seeing you in Copenhagen, Denmark.

If you have any question or comment, please email me.

Regards,

Ali

ECSA 2010 Program Chair.

Time to plan a trip to Korea...

The paper Architecting Automotive Product Lines: Industrial Practice by Håkan Gustavsson from Scania and myself have been accepted to the 14th Software Product Line Conference.

"Dear authors,

Thank you for your submission to SPLC 2010.
We are pleased to inform you that your paper has been accepted for inclusion in the SPLC full paper program.
Due to strong competition, we could only accept 28 full papers out of 90 submissions, giving an acceptance rate of 31%.
Congratulations on being included in this select group.

... snip ...

Once again, congratulations on having your paper accepted.
We look forward to receiving your final revised paper, and to seeing you in September in Juju Island, South Korea.

Sincerely,

Jan Bosch and Jaejoon Lee
PC Co-chairs
SPLC 2010"

More Conferences...

Some readers responded to the previous blog post about conferences. I got information about two more conferences which could be interesting:

SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) Conference
17-21 May, 2010, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Submit a proposal by November 9, 2009.

17th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Engineering of Computer-Based Systems
22-26 March, 2010, St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK
Submission of titles and abstracts 1 November, 2009
Co-located with 15th IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems and 7th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Engineering of Autonomic and Autonomous Systems

Software Architecture conferences 2010

International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2010, 2-8 May in Cape Town. Paper submission was 6 September 2009.
Previous conferences had for example workshops on Automotive Software Engineering, Sharing and Reusing Architectural Knowledge and Leadership and Management in Software Architecture .
Workshop program is not yet published but preliminary deadline for workshop submissions are January 2010.

International Conference Series on the Quality of Software Architectures (QoSA), June 23-25, 2010, Prague, Czech Republic
Paper submission in February, I guess...

European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA), IT-University Copenhagen, 23-26 August 2010
Submission deadline March 15, 2010

Anybody knows of other conferences on software architecture or on automotive software engineering?

Presentation on the Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture & European Conference on Software Architecture

Here are the slides I used at my presentation at the Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture & European Conference on Software Architecture in Cambridge 2009.

The presentation went well, but the questions showed that the audience was more interested in how the organisation perceived the role of it's own software architecture rather than the methodology and scientific conclusions. And the role of architecture was one thing that was not possible to generalise to other organisations...

Another automotive software workshop

I stumbled across a call for paper to the 7. Workshop Automotive Software Engineering taking place in August 2009 in Hamburg. Unfortunately it seems to be conducted entirely in German. Too bad, since it would have been a good opportunity to see what the German manufacturers and suppliers think is most interesting in automotive software right now.

There are very few opportunities to see "what's cooking" in the industry, mostly it is academics presenting, but this workshop seems to have a program committee with a majority from industry. This is one of the few I've heard of besides the biannual Baden-Baden conference.

Narcissism

This blog post will contain some heavy narcissism on my part...

I wrote an article named Experience of introducing reference architectures in the development of automotive electronic systems together with some colleagues. I also gave an appreciated talk at the second international workshop on Software engineering for automotive systems, which was one of the workshops at the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering in St. Louis, MO, USA (ICSE 2005).

ICSE is one of the most prestigious conferences on software engineering (the most prestigious according to some rankings) so the paper should have some academic merit. But it is almost impossible to find my paper in any academic database. The paper is not included in INSPEC, which is the biggest general database about engineering and science, event though INSPEC has articles from ICSE 2005. It is not found in IEEE Explore. The only databases I could find it is in ACM portal, besides Google Scholar.
So it is unlikely my paper will be referenced since nobody knows it exists...

You can find a full-text version of my paper here, courtesy the Mälardalen Research and Technology Centre at Mälardalen University.

Note: INSPEC is not free to use, the other databases should allow you to search, but not download material unless you have a subscription. But Google scholar is usually very good at finding a PDF somewhere on the net if you have the title and author of an article.

Yet another conference

My supervisor, prof. Thomas Arts, have found another conference he thought might interest me: International Conference Series on the Quality of Software Architectures (QoSA).
Some of the topics listed in the call for papers are directly related to my research, e.g:

• design decisions and their influence on the quality of software architecture
• architectural standards and reference architectures
• coordination of business architecture, business processes, and software architecture
• traceability of software architecture to requirements and implementation

Unfortunately the deadline for submissions are already 8 February 2009 and it will be impossible for me to submit the paper I'm presently working on till then. Hopefully they might add a work-in-progress or a student session. I could go to the conference anyway, but it is always more productive if I have something to present.

Thomas also proposed I should think about giving an AUTOSAR tutorial on the WICSA conference. He thinks it would not be too much of work for me, but I think he is not aware how ambitious I usually am when it comes to teaching...

Interesting conferencs

Thre are are some conferences that might be of interest to me next year (2009).

The joint 8th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA) and the 3rd European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) is the the conference I know of aimed directly at my field of research, software architecture. I will try to submit a paper to it with some results of an interview study last year using the Architecture Business Cycle.

The International Conference on Software Engineering is the most prestigious general conference in my field, but none of the main tracks in 2009 are directly related to my research.

But there are two workshops at the conference that sound interesting: Leadership and Management in Software Architecture and Sharing and Reusing architectural Knowledge