International Conference On Software Engineering Research Articles

Guest Editor's Introduction: International Conference on Software Engineering

The papers in this special section contain extended versions of selected papers from the 31st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), held 20-22 May 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

SCORE

The Student Contest on Software Engineering (SCORE), organized for the first time in conjunction with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2009, attracted 50 student teams from around the world, produced an impressive and varied set of projects, and earned appreciative comments from participants and even from teams who chose not to submit their results to the competition. It was a remarkable success, but not without problems and setbacks. In this article we explain the objectives, constraints, and design philosophy of SCORE, particularly as they distinguish it from the tradition of computer science contests focused more narrowly on programming. We also recount key approaches taken to design and management of this novel kind of contest, the difficulties we met (some still outstanding), and the lessons learned.

Report of the workshop on software engineering foundations for end-user programming

The Workshop on Software Engineering Foundations for End-User Programming (SEEUP) was held at the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Vancouver, British Columbia on May 23, 2009. This workshop discussed end-user programming with a specific focus on the software engineering that is required to make it a more disciplined process, while still hiding the complexities of greater discipline from the end user. Speakers covered how to understand the problems and needs of the real end users of end-user programming. The discussion focused on the software engineering and supporting technology that would have to be in place to address these problems and needs.

Special Issue on Search‐Based Software Maintenance

Search-based software engineering (SBSE) consists of the application of metaheuristic search techniques—such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, hill climbing, and tabu search—to software engineering problems. This idea is based on the observation that some software engineering activities can be thought of as optimization problems, and on the fact that techniques providing exact solutions are, very often, unable to adequately scale to large, real-world software engineering problems. Define fitness functions to guide an automated search for solutions, rather than attempting to construct solutions from scratch by hand. SBSE moves the engineer up the abstraction chain, from the tedious and expensive role of detailed solution construction, to the potentially more productive and more cost-effective area of fitness function design. This approach has been repeatedly demonstrated to have successful applications across the software engineering life cycle from requirements and project planning to maintenance and testing. This special issue focuses on applications of search SBSE to the maintenance phase of the life cycle. After software testing 2, software maintenance is the most widely studied application area for SBSE research. Work on SBSE applications to problems in software maintenance can be traced back to the pioneering work of the Mancoridis et al. 3, which led to the development of the Bunch tool for software re-modularization 4. In the past five years there has been a significant increase in SBSE applications to software maintenance and evolution. Search-based techniques have been applied to post-development code improvement problems, such as object-oriented refactoring 5, 6, and imperative language slicing and transformation 7. Other applications are related to software engineering economics and project management problems, such as release planning 8-12, effort, and cost estimation 13-16, and project staffing and planning 17-20. Last, but not the least, SBSE has been applied to deal with service-oriented architectures, for example for services QoS-aware composition 21, service-level agreement negotiation 22, and testing 23. A complete overview of SBSE with a discussion of future research trends can be found in the recent International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) ‘Future of Software Engineering’ paper 24. This issue of the Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice features three outstanding papers, dealing with different aspects of software maintenance and evolution: release planning and staffing, re-factoring, and component substitution. The paper ‘Optimized Staffing for Product Releases—Focused Search and its Application at Chartwell Technologies’ by Puneet Kapur, An Ngo-The, Günther Ruhe, and Andrew Smith presents an approach for optimizing the staffing for product releases. The problem they solve can be viewed as part of the more general release planning problem, which assigns features to releases such that technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints are met. In particular, the genetic search-based approach the authors propose aims at assigning human resources to software development tasks, taking them from a pool of developers having different levels of skills. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated with an industrial case study. The paper ‘Search-Based Refactoring: an Empirical Study’ by Mark O'Keffe and Mel Ó Cinnéide presents an approach to automatically re-factor, using search-based techniques, object-oriented systems that undergo repeated addition of functionality. Such addition can, very often, deteriorate the quality of the system's underlying design. Their re-factoring is guided by the QMOOD quality model 25, and the paper compares different optimization techniques, such as Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, and Multiple Ascent Hill-Climbing. The results of experiments carried out on five software systems suggest that the latter technique outperforms the others. The paper ‘Search-based Many-to-one Component Substitution’ by Nicolas Desnos, Marianne Huchard, Guy Tremblay, Christelle Urtado, and Sylvain Vauttier presents a search-based approach that allows the replacement of an obsolete component with a composition of multiple components. When a component becomes obsolete, the approach searches for a minimal assembly of other components, exposing their functionality by means of ports that preserves the behavior of the original component. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a set of randomly generated components. We hope that readers will enjoy this special issue and find the selected papers insightful and inspiring. We would like to thank all the authors who presented papers for this special issue: there were many good quality papers, but unfortunately we could accept only three of them. Last, but not the least, we would like to thank the reviewers who provided timely, detailed and constructive feedbacks to the authors. Without their precious help this special issue would not have been possible.

A summary of the ICSE 2004 workshop on "scenarios and state machines

This summary reports on the third workshop in the SCESM (SCEnarios and State Machines) series held at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in 2004 in Edinburgh, Scotland. SCESM'04 continues the very successful preceding workshops on this topic, which include a workshop on scenariobased round-trip engineering at OOPSLA 2000, two SCESM workshops at ICSE 2002 [1] and ICSE 2003 [2], and a Dagstuhl Seminar in September 2003 [3]. SCESM'04 has followed this tradition and brought together researchers and practitioners interested in advancing models, algorithms and tools for scenario- and state-oriented approaches to software and systems engineering.

Bridging Academic Software Engineering Education and Industrial Needs

Welcome to the special issue of the Computer Science Education on Software Engineering Education and Training. This special issue of the Computer Science Education includes four of the best education papers of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) as well as one invited article presenting ongoing work in Software Engineering Education (SEE). The articles share a common theme: They emphasize effective education for practical and industrial problems. Some of the articles, in fact, represent case studies of collaborative projects between members of the academic and industrial or government institutions. ICSE, the flagship conference of the software engineering community, is well known for being a world-wide forum where researchers, practitioners, and educators together define and identify new directions of research and practice in software engineering, assess the state of the art, and exchange ideas. The 23rd ICSE, which included a track in SEE, was held in Toronto, Canada, during May 12‐19, 2001. Four of the SEE papers were recommended for further consideration for the Computer Science Education. The authors of the selected papers were requested to revise their original papers and thus were provided with an opportunity to expand on their papers beyond the version published in the proceedings. The invited article provides an investigation into one type of industry/university collaboration to address the existing lack of available software engineers. Formalism and Component-Based Software Development Component-based software development is widely acknowledged as fundamental for improving software productivity and quality. To reason about a component in a modular fashion, without being concerned about the imple

Summary of the second ICSE workshop on web engineering

The series of workshops on Web Engineering started in 1998 with the World Wide Web Conference WWW7 in Brisbane, Australia, and has continued with WWW8 (Toronto, 1999) and WWW9 (Amsterdam, 2000). The first such workshop with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) took place in 1999 in Los Angeles. The second workshop was held on 4-5 June 2000 in Limerick, Ireland and attracted about 30 participants.The main purpose behind these workshops is to share and pool the collective experience of people, both academics and practitioners, who are actively working on Web-based systems.This workshop consisted of two keynote addresses, 11 contributed papers and two sessions of open discussions. The call for papers elicited 18 submissions of which 11 were accepted after peer reviews. The papers presented at the workshop appear in the book Web Engineering (San Murugesan and Yogesh Deshpande (eds.), LNCS, Springer-Verlag, 2000).

International Workshop on Testing Distributed Component-Based Systems

This summary reports on the one-day Workshop on Testing Distributed Component-Based Systems (TDCS) that took place in affiliation with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Los Angeles in May 1999. The workshop dealt with new advances in test methods and test technologies for the emerging class of distributed component-based systems that are built on basis of middleware software like COM, CORBA, or Java RMI, including systems comprising Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. The around thirty workshop attendees discussed what efforts in software technology and research are required to cope with testing such systems. Twelve papers out of nineteen submissions were presented.

Succeedings of the seventh international workshop on software specification and design

Succeedings of the seventh international workshop on software specification and design