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	Elsevier Journal of Systems and Software Special Issue Component-Based Software Engineering: Component Certification and System Prediction Call for Papers Deadline: 1. December 2001
Index   BACKGROUND   PAPERS   SUBMISSION	Editor-in-Chief: Robert L. Glass Guest Editors: Ivica Crnkovic, Mälardalen University (Sweden),   Heinz Schmidt, Monash University (Australia),   Judith Stafford, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (USA),   Kurt Wallnau, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

BACKGROUND

Components play a critical role in many software systems. A primary reason component-based technologies are adopted is that reasoning about component behaviors can be raised to levels of abstraction relatively independent of hardware platforms, operating systems, programming languages or specific middleware technology. A second useful abstraction lies in the definition hierarchy among components.

However, a number of open issues need to be resolved before a component-based approach can make a significant impact to mission-critical software development. Methods must be developed that allow measurement and prediction of the functional and extra-functional characteristics of a system based on properties of system components. There are many extra-functional properties that developers would like to ensure in the systems they develop, including: reliability, safety, robustness, availability, performance, security, modifiability, adaptability, responsiveness, scalability, and so forth.

Our ability to reason about such properties at the level of assemblies of components is of great concern to modern system developers. System integration and changes in configuration, architecture or core components may have a significant impact on those properties. Frequently small structural changes have a discontinuously large impact on such properties. In this context, models of various system compositions and their differences particularly in view of system properties are of interest to practitioners and researchers alike.

In practice, our ability to understand the functional and extra-functional properties of large component-based systems often suffer from:

1. a lack of information about component behavior,
2. a lack of confidence in the information that is available, and
3. an inability to determine properties of component assemblies based on "black box" component representations.

Research and practice in the areas of component trust and certification, component technology, and software architecture to date has been conducted largely in isolation and is only beginning to touch on the core issues. Despite recent advances there remain many open problems.

PAPERS

Topics of interest include:

• Software architecture and system properties
• Measurement and prediction models for component assemblies
• Compositional reasoning techniques for component models
• Pattern, framework and product line properties in relation to system properties
• Extra-functional system properties
• Abstraction vs internals of components and systems
• Target system models for prediction of system properties
• Static and execution-based measurement of system properties
• Assurance and certification of components and component-based systems
• Interchange formats for modeling extra-functional properties

Papers must exhibit practical ideas and include practical evaluations through analysis, simulation and experiments.

In addition they must also address to the following points:

• Identify the innovative aspects of the work.
• Relate the work to the three themes of
  • component trust and certification,
  • component technology, and
  • software architecture.
• Specify one or more open problems, "grand challenges", or critical gaps the work is addressing.
• Address issues of compositionality and scalability of the approach.

SUBMISSION

Authors should format a submission following the instructions for authors and submit an electronic copy of the manuscript in English, in either PDF or Postscript format via electronic mail to hws@monash.edu.au before the submission deadline. Submissions should include authors names, affiliations, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses both on the document cover page and in the email.

Only original manuscripts, which have not been submitted elsewhere, will be considered for publication.

All papers will be subject to a thorough peer review process.

Guest Editors, Elsevier Science, Inc.