Workshops

Monday, August 2, 1999

Workshop 1

 9:30 - 18:00

Project Management of Object-Oriented Developed Systems

The potential for delivering quality software can only exist with quality investigation, analysis and design. The potential for a quality, systems development, life cycle (however brief) can only exist with a co-ordinated strategy of planning and management. This workshop will address the problems of Project Management (PM)as a complete strategy for the planning and management of an O-O developed system.

Compared with 'traditional' systems development O-O systems present a different set of managerial problems (not that the management problems of ' traditional' systems development have ever been successfully solved!) and these need to be addressed both individually and as an integrated, holistic strategy. Application of such a strategy can then ensure the overall quality of systems developed by OO techniques.

The workshop should draw together participants from academia and industry, who have experience of PM in the O-O environment and/or an interest in the planning, control and metrics associated with the stages of development, from initiation to delivery of SW, of O-O systems. Areas of interest within the wide scope of O-O systems development include:

• risk analysis;
• measurement and evaluation of elemental project tasks
• management of reuse;
• co-ordination of projects;
• tools to support O-O PM;
• holistic approach toward one strategy

Wednesday, August 4, 1999

Workshop 2

 9:30 - 18:00

Making the Transition to Component-Based Enterprise Software Development: Overcoming the Obstacles - Patterns for Success

Martin Griss, Ph.D. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Palo Alto, CA, USA griss@hpl.hp.com

Gilda Pour, Ph.D. San Jose State University San Jose, CA, USA gpour@email.sjsu.edu

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. This workshop will be built on the results of our workshop at TOOLS EUROPE '99 in June.

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.

Thursday, August 5, 1999

Workshop 3

 9:30 - 13:00

Component-Based Software Engineering Processes

Kingsley C. Nwosu Software Technology Center Lucent Technologies, Inc. Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA knwosu@lucent.com

Robert C. Seacord Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA rcs@sei.cmu.edu

Over the years, it has been the ambition and goal of the Software Engineering committee to have the ability to quickly assemble or build a software system from compatible and cooperating entities or components. At last, the long cherished ambition of Software System Developers and Integrators is coming to fruition. This has been largely motivated by similar abilities in the companion hardware areas and also by the other foreseeable by products such as shortened time to market and increased productivity.

The Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) process departs drastically from the conventional software development process in that it's integration-centric as opposed to development-centric. And a true CBSE depends mostly on selection, acquisition, and integration of components from external vendors, which raises a lot of issues and problems. There are numerous issues, questions, and risks involved in component selection, acquisition, and integration that must be adequately addressed and resolved in a CBSE project. And all these, and other necessary tasks, such as requirements engineering, domain engineering, etc., must be addressed in the context of a formal Component-Based Software System Development (CBSE) Process.

Workshop Scope
The goal of this workshop is to address issues involved and surrounding the development of Component-Based Software System Development (CBSE) processes. As a result, this workshop will target research and industrial works and experiences that deal with the following issues as they related to CBSE:

• requirements engineering and analysis
• domain engineering and analysis
• interface specification languages and tools
• product and technology evaluation
• integration
• modeling
• design and development
• risk analysis and management
• process models
• system frameworks and architectures
• system maintenance
• repository management