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4th ICSE Workshop on Component-Based Software Engineering:
COMPONENT CERTIFICATION AND SYSTEM PREDICTION

Toronto, Canada
May 14-15, 2001

Held in conjunction with the 23nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2001) Toronto, Canada on May 13-19, 2001. The following information remains as legacy material.

BACKGROUND

Components play a critical role in many software systems. Thus, our ability to reason about the properties of assemblies of components is of great concern to modern system developers. Our ability to understand the functional and extra-functional properties of such systems 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 has only touched on a few core issues. Despite recent advances, there remain many open problems.

WORKSHOP GOALS

CBSE4 will be a two-day workshop that brings together researchers and practitioners from the areas of component trust and certification, component technology, and software architecture with the aim to develop a shared understanding of certifiable component properties and predictable assembly of components. The program committee is representative of these three communities, and we anticipate a lively and provocative workshop.

PARTICIPATING IN THE WORKSHOP

The workshop is open. Position papers will be prioritized by relevance to the goals and objectives of the workshop and invitations will be extended to authors of approximately 25 of the most relevant papers.

Papers should relate to the workshop objectives:

• Define the problem space, for example software properties amenable to compositional analysis, measurement, and prediction.
• Specify one or more open problems, "grand challenges", or critical gaps that can provide a cynosure for community development.
• Relate the research activities of targeted workshop participants to community problems and identify collaboration potential.

Papers should state a position with respect to the following issues:

1. What do developers want to predict about component assemblies?
2. What compositional reasoning techniques are available to support prediction?
3. Which of these techniques benefit from knowledge of component internals and what do they need to know?
4. What can be known about component properties in the absence of knowledge of the context in which it will be deployed and used?
5. How do we measure those properties and what degree of precision is required?
6. How is this information made available by the component?

Position papers will be posted at the workshop's web site in advance of the workshop, providing a forum for advanced discussion and group development of the workshop agenda. A final report on the workshop will be published in a journal such as Software Engineering Notes.

WORKSHOP AGENDA

The workshop will be broken into eight sessions; six working sessions sandwiched between a welcome session and a closing session. The opening session will include introductions to the three focus areas: component trust and certification, component technology, software architecture. The six working sessions will discuss the six issues listed above. Each working session will start with a short presentation by the session chair describing the issue and its relationship to the other five issues. Where appropriate this presentation may also include synopses of some attendee positions on the question at hand. The closing session will include reviews of the six working sessions and discussion of directions for follow-on research.

IMPORTANT DATES

All papers must follow ICSE formatting standards and should be no more than 4 pages in length. Papers must be submitted electronically, in pdf format, to Judith Stafford at the following email address:

jas@sei.cmu.edu

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

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

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Jan Bosch, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Betty Cheng, Michigan State University, USA
Rob Deline, Microsoft Research, USA
George Heineman, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
Daniel Jackson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Otto Preiss, Asea Brown Boveri (ABB)/CRC, Switzerland
Murali Sitaraman, Clemson University, USA
Clemens Szyperski, Microsoft Research, USA
Steve Vestal, Honeywell, Minneapolis, USA
Jeffrey Voas, Reliable Software Technologies, USA
Wolfgang Weck, Oberon Microsystems, Switzerland
Dave Wile, ISI, University of Southern California, USA
Alex Wolf, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
Christian Zeidler, Asea Brown Boveri (ABB)/CRC, Germany