Software Engineering Institute

December 14, 2012 —Members of the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) technical staff will co-organize three workshops held in conjunction with the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013), to be held May 18-26, 2013 in San Francisco, Cal. The workshops will focus on three important areas of SEI research: mobile systems, technical debt, and service oriented architecture. These ICSE workshops will provide an interactive and collaborative environment for software engineering professionals to discuss a range of issues and to advance the understanding of these research and development areas.

International Workshop on the Engineering of Mobile-Enabled Systems

The International Workshop on the Engineering of Mobile-Enabled Systems (MOBS 2013), co-organized by the SEI's Grace Lewis, will examine the ways in which mobile devices and sensors are being integrated into information technology (IT) solutions and reshaping the way in which systems are built. The workshop will take place May 25, 2013. The goal of MOBS 2013 is to create a focal point, and an ongoing forum, for researchers and practitioners to share results and open issues concerning software engineering and these mobile-enabled systems.

"Enterprise and mission-critical systems are becoming more and more dependent on mobile apps and technologies," said Lewis. "These systems now make use of contextual information to optimize resource usage. They're integral to business processes, and they support a wide variety of business tasks, such as image recognition, natural speech language processing, and decision making." Lewis noted that mobile-enabled systems exemplify a new paradigm in which data is produced and consumed in a distributed, heterogeneous, context-aware environment. "This new paradigm opens up many new challenges and opportunities, which is why I'm looking forward to a lively exchange of ideas at MOBS," said Lewis.

MOBS workshop organizers are calling for submissions of papers on variety of related topics, including

• architecting mobile-enabled systems
• requirements for mobile-enabled systems
• context-aware mobile-enabled systems
• cyber-foraging strategies for resource optimization in mobile devices

Submissions are due February 7, 2013. For a complete list of suggested topics, submission guidelines, and additional information about MOBS, please visit http://www.sei.cmu.edu/community/mobs2013/.

International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt

The Fourth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, co-organized by the SEI's Robert Nord and Ipek Ozkaya, recognizes that the metaphor of technical debt has been expanded to include activities beyond coding, the practitioner community has shown increased interest in understanding and managing technical debt throughout the software development life cycle. The workshop will take place May 20, 2013. It will explore the ways in which professionals can manage and continuously and quantitatively analyze software development decisions in large-scale projects as they incur cost, value, and debt.

"We want to provide software engineers a forum for discussing ways to manage the tradeoffs involved between short-term and long-term project goals in large-scale projects," said Ozkaya. "Design shortcuts can give developers the perception of success until their consequences start slowing projects down. This is when they incur technical debt."

This year, workshop organizers are looking for papers on practical experience with technical debt, and approaches to evaluate and manage technical debt, including

• techniques for eliciting technical debt
• visualizing technical debt
• measuring technical debt

Submissions are due February 7, 2013. For a complete list of suggested topics, submission guidelines, and additional information about the Fourth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, please visit http://www.sei.cmu.edu/community/td2013/.

Principles of Engineering Service-Oriented Systems

The Fifth International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service-oriented Systems (PESOS 2013), co-organized by the SEI's Grace Lewis, will take up the theme of service-oriented architecture for the cloud. The workshop will take place May 26, 2013. The workshop will examine cloud platforms and infrastructures and, more specifically, whether their ability to scale on demand translates to all services deployed on them. Organizers are also seeking case studies from participants.

"Cloud computing is shaping the way organizations acquire and use systems," said Lewis. "Because some of the standards for service orientation have stabilized, and because of the need to save on IT costs, organizations are starting to incorporate external software services into their systems, some of which are hosted in the cloud. The implications of this move are important to many researchers and practitioners."

PESOS workshop organizers are calling for submissions of papers on variety of related topics, including

• service engineering for elasticity, scalability, monitorability, and other attributes expected of cloud services
• methods and tools for design-time software engineering support for desired runtime behavior
• management of service-oriented systems in the cloud

Submissions are due February 7, 2013. For a complete list of suggested topics, submission guidelines, and additional information about PESOS 2013, please visit http://www.sei.cmu.edu/community/pesos2013/.

"I am delighted that our staff took the initiative to propose these workshops that were accepted by ICSE." said Linda Northrop, director of the SEI's Research, Technology, and Systems Solutions Program. "ICSE is the ideal forum to make technical progress in these three important areas. We look forward to the opportunity to collaborate with the co-organizers from other organizations and to the productive discussions these ICSE workshops always promote."

For more information about the SEI's research in mobile systems, please visit https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/tags/tactical-systems/ and https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/tags/pervasive-mobile-computing/.

For more information about the SEI's research in the area of technical debt, please visit https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/sei_blog/technical-debt/.

For more information about the SEI's research in the area of service-oriented architecture, please visit https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/category/service-oriented-architecture/.

For information about ICSE, please visit http://2013.icse-conferences.org/.