[skoll] "Jan Bosch": Special issue SPIP - Software Variability: Process and Management (fwd)

[Don Hinton]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 21:11:11 -0500 (EST)
From: Atif Memon <atif at cs.umd.edu>
To: skoll-bounces at list.isis.vanderbilt.edu
Subject: "Jan Bosch": Special issue SPIP -  Software Variability: Process
    and Management (fwd)


	Refreshing memory!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 20:28:42 -0600
From: Douglas C. Schmidt <schmidt at cs.wustl.edu>
To: aporter at cs.umd.edu
Cc: arvindk at dre.vanderbilt.edu, atif at cs.umd.edu
Subject: "Jan Bosch": Special issue SPIP -  Software Variability: Process
    and Management


Hi folks,

        We should definitely see if we can submit something to this!

        Thanks,

                Doug

------- Forwarded Message

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

International Journal of Software Process: Improvement and Practice SPIP

Special issue

Software Variability: Process and Management

Deadline: 31 March 2004

Most modern software needs to support increasing amounts of variability,
i.e. locations in the software where behaviour can be configured. This trend
leads to a situation where the complexity of managing the amount of
variability becomes a primary concern that needs to be addressed. Two causes
for the increasing amount of variability are the delaying of design
decisions to the latest point that is economically feasible and the transfer
of variability from mechanics and hardware to the software in embedded
systems. Examples of the first category include software product families,
the configuration wizards and tools in most commercial software, the
configuration interface of software components in component-based software
engineering and even the dynamic, run-time composition of web-services.
Examples of the second category can be found in many embedded systems,
including car electronics, telecommunications and consumer electronics.

Software variability is the ability of a software system or artefact to be
changed, customized or configured for use in a particular context. A high
degree of variability allows the use of software in a broader range of
contexts, i.e. the software is more reusable. Variability can be viewed as
consisting of two dimensions, i.e. space and time. The space dimension is
concerned with the use of software in multiple contexts, e.g. multiple
products in a software product family. The time dimension is concerned with
the ability of software to support evolution and changing requirements in
its various contexts.

The increasingly predominant role of software variability also has its
effects on the software processes that are employed in organizations,
including, among others, development, evolution, assessment and testing
processes. For instance, increasing the amount of late bound variability in
a system has substantial effects on the way testing is organized. A second
area affected by variability, is the process of product derivation in
software product families or configuration in highly configurable products.

This special issue explicitly addresses the processes and management
activities surrounding software variability. The rationale for this is that
variability is the key technical challenge in all software reuse, including
object-oriented frameworks, component-based software engineering and
software product families. The applicability of a software artefact in a
particular context is determined its support for the required variability.
With the increasing adoption of software reuse, the number of variation
points as well as their interdependencies has grown to a level that more
systematic approaches are needed. For instance, the number of variation
points for industrial software product families may range in the thousands.


Topics
We solicit articles discussing processes surrounding and management of
software variability. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Development
• Identifying and specifying required variability
• Product derivation processes
• Feature-driven, automated and run-time (re-)configuration
• Designing variation points, including binding time and
  mechanism selection
• Designing quality attribute variability

Evolution
• Evolution of required and provided variability
• Managing variation point dependencies
• Managing third party variants over the lifecycle

Validation
• Assessing required and provided variability
• Assessing quality attribute variability
• Testing processes over the lifecycle, including installation-time
  and run-time testing

For more details see our online call for papers and submission page at
http://segroup.cs.rug.nl/SPIP.

Reviewers
The contributions for the special issue need to be reviewed and for this we
are looking for volunteers that are interested in acting as reviewers.
Reviewers will be named in the introduction of the special issue.

Important dates
Deadline for article submissions: 31 March 2004
Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2004
Electronic publication (tentatively): fall 2004
Publication in print (tentatively): spring 2005

Guest Editor
Jan Bosch
University of Groningen
Department of Computing Science
The Netherlands
Jan.Bosch at cs.rug.nl
http://www.cs.rug.nl/~bosch

- --
Jan Bosch, Professor of software engineering
University of Groningen, Department of Computing Science
PO Box 800, NL9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
Phone: +31 50 3633941 Fax: +31 50 3633800  Cellular: +31-6-51150020
E-mail: Jan.Bosch at cs.rug.nl WWW: segroup.cs.rug.nl
4th Working IFIP/IEEE Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA4.cs.rug.nl)
– deadline 16-02-04
8th International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR8.cs.rug.nl) – deadline
31-01-04



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