I participated in the Working Meeting on ‘Models and Aspects for Product Families: A Roadmap for Research‘ back in November and a workshop covering some of the same topics (with some of the same participants) is now being organised as part of GPCE 07.

The Call for Papers for the workshop is now available:

Second Workshop on Aspect-Oriented Product Line Engineering
Thursday October 4, 2007 Salzburg, Austria

Abstract

Product Line Engineering (PLE) is an increasingly important paradigm in software development whereby commonalities and variations among similar systems are systematically identified and exploited. PLE covers a large spectrum of activities, from domain analysis to product validation and testing.

Variability is manifested throughout this spectrum in artifacts such as requirements, models, code and documentation and it is often of crosscutting nature. These characteristics make Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) techniques appealing as suitable candidates to modularize variability. Prior work on Generative Programming (GP) and Component Engineering (CE) has shown their successful applicability to PLE and the potential benefits of AOSD.

This workshop aims at expanding and capitalizing on the increasing interest of researchers from these communities. It builds on the success of last year’s workshop that established an initial community and formulated a first joint research agenda. The main goal of the workshop is to strengthen the established collaborations, to share and discussed ideas, identify research opportunities and foster collaboration to tackle the challenges these opportunities may bring about.

Goals

Work on Aspect-Oriented Software Development concepts and techniques applied to Software Product Line Engineering has shown promising results. These results can be further strengthened when Generative Programming and Component Engineering techniques are applied in concert. The main goal of the workshop is to foster and strengthen the collaboration between the AOSD, PLE and generative research communities by identifying common interests and research venues. It builds on the success of the last year workshop that established an initial community of researchers from different fields and formulated a first joint research agenda.

Workshop Format

The workshop is scheduled as a full day workshop. The morning session will consist of paper presentations. Each paper will be presented by its author(s) and discussed by two other workshop participants (authors of other papers, PC members or organizers). The assignment of discussants of papers and the points they should address will be announced with the acceptance notification.

Interesting discussion topics will be collected for the afternoon session. In the afternoon we will use the Open Space format in order to discuss topics of interest that might be related but not restricted to the papers presented in the morning. The results of the discussion groups will be presented in the last half hour of the workshop.

The papers and a summary of the discussions will be compiled into a technical report that will be posted on the workshop’s web site. If we receive a significant amount of submissions of high quality, we will consider submitting them to a special issue of some journal.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: August 3, 2007
Notification: August 24, 2007
Camera ready: September 14, 2007
Workshop: October 4, 2007

Submissions

We invite submissions of 2 to 6 pages long in ACM or IEEE format. Papers must be submitted as Postcript or PDF files. The papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee and the organization committee.

We are looking for contributions in the following topics but not limited to:

• The role of aspects during Domain Engineering and/or Application
  Engineering
• AOSD techniques applied to mapping and traceability of requirements to
  architecture, design and implementation of product line systems
• AO approaches for independent feature development and feature composition
• Application of generative AOSD techniques to product line engineering
• Product line testing and evolution using aspects and generative techniques
• Core asset and variability management using aspects and generative techniques
• Aspects and product line adoption
• Alliance between AOSD, DSLs and MDD in product line engineering
• Case studies on aspects and software product lines

See workshop web site for more submission details.

Organizers

Neil Loughran - Lancaster University
Iris Groher - Siemens AG Germany & Linz University
Roberto Lopez-Herrejon - University of Oxford
Sven Apel - University of Passau
Christa Schwanninger - Siemens AG, Germany

Program Committee

Charles Krueger, Biglever Software Inc
Jeff Gray, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Vander Alves , Lancaster University
Rob van Ommering, Philips Research
Markus Voelter, Independent Consultant
Andreas Rummler, SAP
Danilo Beuche, pure-systems GmbH

I’ve just heard that Krzysztof Czarnecki co-author of the book “Generative Programming” will join the “Next few years” panel at Code Generation 2007.

The panel is led by independent consultant Markus Völter and includes other luminaries such as Steven Kelly (MetaCase), Laurence Tratt (University of London) and Andrew Watson (OMG).

Panellists will discuss emerging approaches such as MDSD, DSLs, MDA, DSM and Software Factories and attempt to make some predictions about which are likely to become important over the next few years and how they will evolve.