2nd Groningen Workshop on Software Variability Management

2nd Groningen Workshop on Software Variability Management: Software Product Families and Populations

Celebrating 10 years of Software Product Families!

 

Date: December 2 – 3, 2004

Location: University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

 

Introduction

Most modern software needs to support increasing amounts of variability, i.e. locations in the software where behaviour can be configured. This trend leads to a situation where the complexity of managing the amount of variability becomes a primary concern that needs to be addressed. Two causes for the increasing amount of variability are the delaying of design decisions to the latest point that is economically feasible and the transfer of variability from mechanics and hardware to the software in embedded systems.

Software product families and populations make a convincing case for the increasing importance of software variability management. Although the notion of software product families dates back to the 1970’s, broad industrial adoption started at the end of the 1990s. Early industrial adopters, such as Philips, started their work on software product families in 1994. Among others, this took place in the EU IST FP4 project ARES involving, as industrial partners, Philips and Nokia. Hence the workshop aims to celebrate the 10 year anniversary.

The reason for identifying software variability management as a core topic is twofold. First, within the software engineering research community, we have come to realize that the fundamental issue in a range of reuse approaches, including object-oriented frameworks, component-based software engineering and software product families, is the management of the provided variability in the context of the commonality. Basically, the reusability of any software artefact is determined by its ability to support the variability required from it. Second, in several industrial organizations, the complexity of variability management is becoming such that more systematic approaches are required as the limitations of ad-hoc approaches experienced daily. For instance, the number of variation points for industrial software product families may range in the thousands.

 

Topics

The theme and focus of the second workshop is software product families and populations. To support the discussion, we solicit position papers discussing methods, techniques and/or tools addressing software variability management but also other topics in the domain of the theme will be addressed. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

· Design, use and evolution of software variability and commonality

· Software architecture

· Product derivation

· Features: modelling, implementation and selection

· Software components

· Assessment and evaluation

· Adoption and institutionalisation of product families and populations

· Evolution

 

Program and Deadlines

The workshop is explicitly intended as an interactive event with ample opportunity for discussion. Therefore, the program will have the following structure:

 

Location: Senaatskamer Academiegebouw

 

Thursday, December 2nd  

 

 

Friday, December 3th 2004

The links in the program refer to the corresponding presentation slides.

Pictures of the workshop can be found here.

 

 There are three ways in which you can contribute to the workshop:

• Full paper – deadline October 17, 2007. Full papers will be considered for presentation in the plenary session.
• Abstract – deadline November 14, 2004. (Extended) abstracts will be considered for presentation and guidance in the discussion groups.
• Participation – deadline November 21, 2004. For practical reasons, we need a reasonable indication of the number of participants and would like you to inform us at or before the deadline. We will be able to accept a small number of late registrants.

The workshop proceedings will be published as a technical report at the University of Groningen.

 

Organization

Program chairs:

• Jan Bosch, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
• Henk Obbink, Philips Research, The Netherlands

Program committee: (to be completed)

• Serge Demeyer, University of Antwerp, Belgium.
• Dieter Hammer, Technical University Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
• Philippe Kruchten, University of British Columbia, Canada.
• Tomi Männistö, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.
• Frank van der Linden, Philips Medical Systems, The Netherlands.
• Jeff Magee, Imperial College London, United Kingdom.
• John MacGregor, Robert Bosch GbmH, Germany
• Jos Nijhuis , University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
• Rob van Ommering, Philips Research, The Netherlands.
• Klaus Pohl, University of Duisburg/Essen, Germany.
• Hans van Vliet, Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 
• David Weiss, Avaya Research, USA.
• Jan Gerben Wijnstra, Philips Semiconductors, The Netherlands.

Sponsors

Philips Research, Philips Medical Systems, ConIPF project

 

More information

For more information send and email to D.J.Hansen@cs.rug.nl.