Feature Interaction in Composed Systems
June 18, Budapest, Hungary.
Workshop's web site: http://i44w3.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/~pulvermu/workshops/ecoop2001/index.html
The history of computer science has shown that decomposing software
applications helps managing their complexity and facilitates reuse,
but also bears challenging problems still unsolved, such as the
assembly of the decomposed features when non-trivial feature
interactions are involved. Examples of features include concerns or
aspects, black box or white box components, and functional and
non-functional requirements. Approaches such as object-oriented and
component-based software development, as well as relatively new
directions such as aspect-oriented programming, multi-dimensional
separation of concerns and generative programming, all provide
technical support for the definition and syntactical assembly of
features, but fall short on the semantic level, for example in
spotting meaningless or even faulty combinations. At previous ECOOPs,
OOPSLAs and GCSEs dedicated events have been organised around the
aforementioned technologies, where we experienced a growing awareness
of this feature interaction problem. However, feature interaction is
often merely dismissed as a secondary problem, percolating as an
afterthought while other issues are being addressed. This workshop
intends to be the first co-ordinated effort to address the general
problem of feature interaction in composed systems separately from
other issues.
All submissions compliant to a provided guideline will be selected
from a review committee of well-known experts in this domain. A small
set of submissions that raise important issues and are most likely to
ignite discussions will be presented in the plenary session at the
beginning of the workshop. The major part of the workshop will be
spent on group work, ending in presentations of the group results.
Collaborative work continues after the workshop, since each group
will produce a small report which will be collected into the workshop
report.
The history of computer science has shown that decomposing software
applications helps managing their complexity and facilitates reuse,
but also bears challenging problems still unsolved, such as the
assembly of the decomposed features when non-trivial feature
interactions are involved. Examples of features include concerns or
aspects, black box or white box components, and functional and
non-functional requirements. Approaches such as object-oriented and
component-based software development, as well as relatively new
directions such as aspect-oriented programming, multi-dimensional
separation of concerns and generative programming, all provide
technical support for the definition and syntactical assembly of
features, but fall short on the semantic level, for example in
spotting meaningless or even faulty combinations. At previous ECOOPs,
OOPSLAs and GCSEs dedicated events have been organised around the
aforementioned technologies, where we experienced a growing awareness
of this feature interaction problem. However, feature interaction is
often merely dismissed as a secondary problem, percolating as an
afterthought while other issues are being addressed. This workshop
intends to be the first co-ordinated effort to address the general
problem of feature interaction in composed systems separately from
other issues.
Examples of currently known feature interaction problems include the
combination of features in feature-oriented programming, the
combination of aspects in AOP, the combinations of subjects in SOP,
black-box composition of components, combining mixins or more
generally the combination of class hierarchies and the combination of
several meta programs. One of the goals of the workshop is to extend
this list further and to identify and categorise the characterising
properties of its various instances.
All submissions compliant to a provided guideline will be selected
from a review committee of well-known experts in this domain. A small
set of submissions that raise important issues and are most likely to
ignite discussions will be presented in the plenary session at the
beginning of the workshop. The major part of the workshop will be
spent on group work, ending in presentations of the group results.
Collaborative work continues after the workshop, since each group
will produce a small report which will be collected into the workshop
report.
- Bring together the researchers in the different domains facing this problem.
- Select, collect and classify the different problems in the area of
feature composition in research and practice.
- Provide a platform to exchange the problems and experiences in this field.
- Select and communicate the different approaches to ensure valid
component compositions.
- Promote and encourage the ongoing collaborations to deal with this
multifarious and cross-cutting problem.
- Discuss further open issues.
- Composition and interaction problems in research and industry.
- Artificial intelligence supporting the developer in this problem.
- Theoretical foundation of composition and interaction verification.
- The role of interfaces in the interaction validation domain.
- Methods to assure certain qualities of service after composition.
- Measurement and categorisation of feature interaction problems.
- The usage of pre- and post-conditions in identifying and tackling
feature interactions.
Since feature interaction also occurs in the domain of advanced
separation of concerns, where these features are of the more
cross-cutting and systemic kind (such as aspects), there will be
some overlap with workshop #10. Organisers of both workshops
acknowledged this overlap and agreed to a possible joint session
depending on the issues raised by the participants.
Feature interaction in composed systems is a generic problem in any
compositional approach. While the Workshop on Component-Oriented Programming
(WCOP 2001) incorporates such feature interaction as a topic of interest
if clearly linked to the issues of component-oriented programming (as defined
for the purpose of WCOP 2001) this FICS 2001 workshop covers all feature
interaction issues in a broader sense and is more appropriate to discuss
these topics as found in more generic composition theories and approaches.
Besides the composition of components, examples of such interaction
issues include aspect composition, mixin-combinations,
subject composition.
- April 17, 2001:
- Deadline for indication of interest by email
- April 23, 2001:
- Deadline for submission of position papers
- May 10, 2001:
- Notification of acceptance
- May 15, 2001:
- Early registration deadline
- June 18, 2001:
- Workshop
Authors are invited to submit a position paper not exceeding 6 pages
(single-spaced, 12pt, approximately 2000 words) by April 23, 2001.
Electronic submissions are required. Please send an e-mail
containing your submission in HTML and [postscript | PDF] to
pulvermueller@acm.org
Authors intending to submit a paper are invited to send an e-mail
of interest by April 17, 2001 to the address above, containing
title, authors and short abstract (100 words) of the paper
allowing us to dispatch the papers over the reviewers.
The acceptance of a paper implies that at least one of the
authors will register for the workshop and thus present the paper.
(Maybe shortened versions of the) papers accepted for presentation
will be published on the Workshop Web site. Compilations of the group
discussions and the group members' position papers will be included
in the workshop reader.
- Don Batory (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
- Johan Brichau (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
- Lee Carver (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA)
- Krzysztof Czarnecki (DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany)
- Erik Ernst (University of Aalborg, Denmark)
- Patrick Steyaert (MediaGeniX, Belgium)
- Shmuel Tyszberowicz (Tel-Aviv University, Israel)
- Elke Pulvermueller
- pulvermueller@acm.org
- Universitaet Karlsruhe
- Andreas Speck
- andreas.speck@gmx.de
- University of Tuebingen
- James O. Coplien
- cope@research.bell-labs.com
- Bell Laboratories
- Maja D'Hondt
- mjdhondt@vub.ac.be
- Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- Wolfgang De Meuter
- wdmeuter@vub.ac.be
- Vrije Universiteit Brussel