1st Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning about Software Architectures
April 8th, 2016, Venice, Italy
A Workshop at WICSA and CompArch 2016
www.softwarearchitecture.org
News
Initial results of the workshop in form of raw notes are available now on the results page.
Call for Papers
Theme: The quality properties that software systems aim to satisfy are key to the success of the systems. For many quality properties, methods and techniques have been developed for assessing these properties, such as: performance, reliability, availability and some more. Several important architectural properties elude such quantitative assessment techniques- notably: maintainability (modifyiability, portability, extensability), interoperability. Having approaches for better assessing these properties would help in various aspects of managing software development, one particular application being managing technical debt.
A lot of work exists in the area of metrics for maintainability, for example. However, metrics suffer from several drawbacks: (1) it may be unclear whether that metric is valid, i.e. whether it really measures the quality property of interest, (2) it remains difficult to interpret metrics (‘What does a maintainability of 4.5 mean?’) and (3) it may be too expensive to collect the data for computing the metric (e.g. building a fully fledged reliability model might not be cost-efficient for many systems). Thus, quantification is not always a good choice. Qualitative approaches could be a complementary approach for (automatically) making sense of this quantitative data.
Goal: In this workshop we aim to bring together researchers and practitioners who are interested in discussing, investigating and creating qualitative approaches for assessing and in general reasoning about these architectural properties.
Topics:
- proof of concepts of qualitative reasoning methods for architectural quality properties
- reasoning frameworks
- metrics for qualitative reasoning
- architecture viewpoints for supporting qualitative reasoning
- architecture trade-off analysis
- architecture rationale management
- lessons learned from attempts at qualitative reasoning about architectural qualities
- industrial case studies
- benchmark/challenge-cases - propose a case and illustrate the type of qualitative reasoning that you have done/captured, or would like to see automated.
- architecture reasoning in teaching - e.g. for grading of for providing feedback to student designs.
- software architecture design assistants (SADA). This term includes any tool that takes as input some form achitecture/design and interacts with the architect to identify areas of the design that could be improved and ideally also suggests ways of improving the design.
Submission information
We solicit two types of submissions from the software architecture community: full papers and short papers. Full papers are limited to 10 proceedings pages, at most 8000 words. Short papers are limited to 6 proceedings pages, at most 4500 words. Accepted papers will be submitted for inclusion to IEEE Xplore.
All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the IEEE Formatting Guidelines and use the A4 page format. Please submit using the following Easychair link and select the track "1st WICSA Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning about Software Architectures": https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wicsaandcomparch2016
Papers due: 18th of February 2016 (thursday)
Papers notification: 4th of March 2016 (friday)
Camera-ready due: 11th of March 2016 (friday)
New: Two or three papers may be selected for submission to a special issue of the 'Software Practice and Experience' (SPE) Journal: Design Methods for Software Architectures in the Service-oriented Computing and Cloud Paradigms, Guest Editors: Manuel Mora, Rory O’Connor, Frank Tsui, Jorge Marx Gómez.[1]
Links
[1] http://optimisationcpugpu-hpc.blogspot.se/2015/11/cfp-design-methods-for-software.html