ACM SIGSOFT 2008 / Foundations of Software Engineering Workshop:
Workshop website: http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/CAGSD-2008
Global software development (GSD) is becoming the norm for developing complex enterprise IT. Businesses tap global talent pools with a goal to lower costs while improving efficiency, increasing productivity, and reducing risk. However, these are conflicting goals that are hard enough to balance in small and co-located projects. GSD adds an additional layer of complexity.
While past workshops (such as GSD at ICSE) have looked in a general way at this problem, we propose focusing on one of the most promising solutions that is beginning to find its way into practice: basing development on an over-arching architectural framework that implicitly partitions the development process. The concepts of componentization and abstraction have proven their value in managing complexity in software methodologies such as object oriented programming. Service oriented architecture (SOA) is now playing a significant role in standardizing the way that businesses expose functionality, define their business processes, and structure integration between monolithic software applications.
Implicit in adoption of SOA and other frameworks is the assumption that these architectural principles enable a better division of labor between software development teams that need to coordinate across organizational, geographical, and cultural boundaries. The approach seems promising, but it may require the presence of additional supporting mechanisms such as process, governance, knowledge management, measurements, monitoring, awareness, collaboration, testing, change management and requirements. The goal of this workshop is to bring together both researchers and practitioners who are exploring problems that lie at the intersection of these two areas – GSD and framework-based architectures -- to identify the core challenges and examine approaches that show promise in improving the current state of the art.
In the context of componentization and globally distributed software development, topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Given that this topic is relevant and important to practitioners, we expect significant participation from both the industry as well as academia. We are being conservative in our estimates given that this is the first year that we are planning this workshop at this conference. Our past experience in organizing a workshop of this nature has always produced more participants than anticipated.
The initial plan is to have 2-3 keynotes and about eight regular paper presentations to leave enough time for interaction and discussions. The presenters for the workshop will be selected on the basis of paper submissions. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. In addition to presenting participants, the workshop is open to co-authors and other interested parties within the limits of the maximum number of participants (40). Paper submission is open for all, including the PC members and organizers. However, special care is taken to ensure that authors are not involved in judging their own papers.
We will publish the accepted and presented contributions in the ACM Digital Library together with the proceedings of the main conference.
Daniel Oppenheim is a Senior Research Scientists at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He received his doctorate degree from Stanford University for his interdisciplinary research on real-time systems, creativity, and new usability paradigms. He is currently a member of the process automation team within the new Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) discipline, focusing his research on business processes, globalization, innovation, and governance. He is the lead architect for the IBM Application Factory – an automation environment and framework for managing large and globally distributed IT projects. This framework is being currently hardened by IBM Global Business Services as a commercial asset.
James Herbsleb is a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Software Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie primarily in the intersection of software engineering and computer-supported cooperative work, focusing on such areas as geographically-distributed development teams, open source software development, and more generally on coordination in software engineering. He holds a JD (1980) and a PhD in psychology (1984) from the University of Nebraska, and an MS in computer science (1991) from the University of Michigan. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, he moved to Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, where he led an effort to empirically validate the CMM for Software. He then joined the Software Production Research Department at Lucent Technologies, where he initiated and led the Bell Labs Collaboratory Project, which conducted empirical studies and designed collaborative technologies and practices for global software development. He is currently PI on two NSF-funded projects investigating various aspects of collaborative software engineering. His research interests are in geographically- distributed software engineering, open source software development, collaboration over distance, and tools and technologies that support coordination.
Krishna Ratakonda is a research scientist and manager of the process automation group in IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He manages research projects that help improve the efficiency of the IBM Services organization through better design and process automation – in particular his group works closely with the Application Services division which is responsible for designing and implementing complex IT projects for many large corporate clients. Prior to the current assignment, he managed the Content Servers group in IBM Research that built core components of DB2 Content Manager. He received MS and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1997 and 1999. Immediately after graduating, he started his career at IBM Research in the position of a Research Scientist. At Illinois, he received awards for outstanding graduate research from both the School of Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering. He has authored over 40 papers, 6 patents and served as session chair in multiple academic and industry conferences.
Yi-Min Chee is a Senior Software Engineer at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. He has extensive experience investigating and developing tools and environments for software development, covering a wide variety of areas including C++ programming environments, toolkits and standards for electronic ink-enabled applications, and model-driven design and development of SOA-based solutions. He is the lead architect for SOMA-ME, a componentized architecture design environment that is widely deployed within IBM Global Services and used by practitioners for architecting SOA solutions for enterprise customers. He received his bachelor’s degree from MIT and MS from Columbia University, both in Computer Science.
Grace Lewis is the lead for the System of Systems Engineering team within the Integration of Software-Intensive Systems (ISIS) initiative. Current projects of this team are Guidelines for Engineering Systems of Systems Migration of Legacy Components to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Environments Evaluation of Technologies for Interoperability using T-Checks Guidelines for Development of SOA-Based Systems Grace was also the lead for the FY07 Independent Research and Development (IRAD) project titled "A Research Agenda for Service-Oriented Architecture". A book with the results will be published this year.
Daniel Oppenheim (music@us.ibm.com)
Krishna Ratakonda (ratakond@us.ibm.com)
Yi-Min Chee (ymchee@us.ibm.com)
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
19 Skyline Drive
Hawthorne, NY 10598
Jim Herbsleb (jdh@cs.cmu.edu)
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Grace Lewis (glewis@sei.cmu.edu)
Software Engineering Institute