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Eiffel Workshop: Tools and Platforms
Simon Parker, Eiffel Ireland, Ireland
sparker@eiffel.ie
Eiffel compilers, development environments, application builders and other language processing tools are available for a wide range of operating systems and hardware architectures.
What's the target platform for your next project? What development platforms are available to you? What tool support can the Eiffel vendors offer on these platforms?
The workshop will provide an opportunity to hear presentations and discuss these issues with suppliers and consumers.
Making the Transition to Component-Based Enterprise Software Development: Overcoming the Obstacles - Patterns for Success
| Gilda Pour, Ph.D. San Jose State University San Jose, CA, USA gpour@email.sjsu.edu |
Martin Griss, Ph.D. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Palo Alto, CA, USA griss@hpl.hp.com |
John Favaro Intecs Sistemi Pisa, Italy favaro@pisa.intecs.it |
All major IT market research firms have identified component-based enterprise software development (CBESD) as the rapidly emerging trend in the software engineering. CBESD is based on the concept of developing software systems by selecting reusable software components and assembling them within appropriate software architectures. By promoting the use of object-oriented software components built by commercial vendors or in-house developers, CBESD delivers the promise of large-scale software reuse. CBESD has the potential to reduce significantly the cost and time-to-market, enhance the reliability, improve the maintainability, and enhance the quality of enterprise software systems.
Over the past few years, IT and business organizations have been engaged in an informal kind of reuse through code sharing, design patterns, etc. However, the systematic reuse of software components across multiple applications and projects is in its infancy. This is due to a wide variety of obstacles are faced in making the transition from the traditional software development approach to CBESD. To overcome those obstacles, several engineering, process-related, organizational, and business-oriented issues should be addressed. The following obstacles are typically cited: (1) Business-oriented issues concerning how component development and support should be funded, lack of funding for education, training, access to vendor-supplied components, lack of a convincing business case and economic model for long term investment, unclear definition of product-line model and features, etc., (2) Process-related issues due to low process maturity of the organization, ill-defined or unfamiliar reuse-oriented methods and processes, new inter-group coordination and management needs, and well tested and documented methods and models to relate features to component sets and variability, etc., (3) Organizational issues due to the lack of a systematic practice for reuse activities and enterprise component development, lack of management expertise and support, etc., (4) Engineering issues mainly due to the lack of adequate techniques and tools for identifying, designing, documenting, testing, packaging, categorizing, and integration of reusable software components, too few and poorly understood standard patterns and architectures, COTS integration, etc., and (5) Infrastructure issues due to the lack of widespread use of a standardized design notation such as the UML, common tools, base components, different programming languages and environments, support for multi-group configuration management, etc.
This workshop provides a forum for researchers and practitioners to meet and discuss the key challenges involved in the transition to object-oriented component-based enterprise software development. This workshop is a major part of an international collaborative effort that is led by the workshop organizers and aims at developing a consensus on the dominant obstacles and their best practice solution(s), and will establish a repository of patterns of reuse success.
All IT and software professionals who have actively participated in making such transitions in their organizations are invited to participate in the workshop and share their experiences and their patterns of reuse success. It would be most beneficial if participants describe how the approach taken by their organizations has integrated different elements such as business-case analysis, domain engineering, product line architecting, people and process management, and lifecycle software asset management. Each workshop participant will give a short presentation (about 5-8 minutes) on his/her organization's experience of the transition and the lessons learned from that experience. Workshop attendees will participate in making and prioritizing a list of the obstacles that they find important and relevant to the workshop theme. Focus groups will then discuss and brainstorm a number of the obstacles and identify the best approaches to overcome those obstacles, ideally documented in the form of patterns. Each group will report on the results of their discussion and brainstorming. The collection of discussions, comments and their suggested solutions (patterns) will be merged and refined to provide a prioritized list with suggested practical remedies.
More details on submission guidelines and the workshop output can be found on the workshop web site http://www.hpl.hp.com/reuse/cbesd.
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Designing Reusable Object-Oriented Architectures - Challenges, Methods & Tools
| Kai Koskimies Tampere University of Technology Tampere, Finland kk@cs.tut.fi http://www.cs.tut.fi/~kk/ |
Jan Bosch University of Karlskrona/Ronneby Ronneby, Sweden Jan.Bosch@ide.hk-r.se http://www.ide.hk-r.se/~bosch |
| Wolfgang Pree University of Constance Constance, Germany pree@acm.org http://www.informatik.uni-konstanz.de/swe |
Görel Hedin Lund University Lund, Sweden Gorel.Hedin@dna.lth.se http://www.dna.lth.se/home/GorelHedin |
More and more software developers are recognizing the need for solutions that make it possible to share code between different applications in the same domain. Reusing code increases not only the productivity of the developers but also the reliability and maintainability of the software products. Many software companies have ended up with a repository of enterprise components modelling the core business of the company, or with a product-line architecture that captures the common aspects of a family of software products. In both cases, object-orientation offers a technology that enables these solutions.
The workshop studies the problems in designing reuse-oriented architectures (ROA) within the OO paradigm and the OO techniques that support this. The design of such systems is much harder than the design of individual applications, because ROAs need to be valid for unforeseen applications. Instead of a closed world of application concepts, the designer must analyze the variable aspects of a domain. The workshop covers a wide range of topics related to the development of ROAs, including:
Participation
Participation in the workshop can be achieved in three ways:
Deadlines
Both a workshop paper and a position paper must be submitted to Kai Koskimies before April 23. A request for participation (without paper) can be sent to any of the organizers below before May 31. The notification of acceptance/rejection will be sent to authors before May 14.
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Trusted Components
Jean-Marc Jézéquel, IRISA/CNRS, France
jezequel@irisa.fr
2nd Workshop on Trusted Components
Using "off-the-shelf" software components in mission-critical applications is not yet as commonplace as in desktop applications. Opposite to electronic components, there is a lack of methods and quality estimates in the software domain which makes it difficult to build trust into software components. While electronic devices have sets of measures characterizing their quality (reliability, performances, use-domain, speed scale), no real consensus exists to measure such quality characteristics for software components. A second problem is the software component expected capability to evolve (addition of new functionality, implementation change) and to be adapted to various environments.
Trusted components are reusable software elements equipped with a strong presumption of high quality, based on a combination of convincing arguments of various kinds: technical (e.g. Design by Contract, thorough and meaningful testing, appropriate programming language, formal proofs), managerial (e.g. systematic process based on CMM or similar), social (e.g. reputation of the components' authors).
The idea of trusted components was introduced in an IEEE Computer article of May 1998 and earlier presentations in the same journal (Object Technology column). A first Trusted Components workshop was held at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) at the end of TOOLS PACIFIC 1998 on November 28, 1998.
The purpose of this workshop is to set up a forum where interested people can share their point of view on the idea of trusted components and identify research directions to help the industry move towards this goal.
See the TOOLS Europe '99 programme (PDF)
contact us at tools-europe@tools-conferences.com to receive your copy.