held in conjunction with

April 5 - 13, 2003, Warsaw, Poland

[Full CfP in PDF format]

Second International Workshop on Unanticipated Software Evolution

Online proceedings April 5-6, 2003 Mailing list

March 11, 2003: Online proceedings available March 7, 2003: The venue of the USE workshop is Room 5820, Faculty of Mathematics, Ochota Campus of Warsaw University (see ETAPS venue page) Feb 13, 2003: Programme and link to mailing list published Feb 7, 2003: Submission page updated (submission system and LaTex style)

Background
Many studies of complex software systems have shown that more than 80% of the total cost of software development is devoted to software maintenance. This is mainly due to the need for software systems to evolve in the face of changing requirements. In some cases, software evolution may need to be dynamic, with changes being performed on running systems.

Despite the importance of software evolution, techniques and technologies that offer support for software evolution are far from ideal. In particular, unanticipated requirement changes are not well supported, although they account for most of the technical complications and related costs of evolving software.

By definition, unanticipated software evolution (USE) is not something for which we can prepare during the design of a software system. Therefore, support for such evolution in programming languages, and component models and related runtime infrastructures becomes a key issue. Without it, unanticipated changes often force software engineers to perform extensive invasive modification of existing designs and code.

This two-day workshop will address the issues inherent in incremental static and dynamic evolution. The main goal of the workshop is to discuss new approaches for building large-scale software systems that are evolvable when faced with unanticipated requirements. We also want to promote lively discussion between researchers proposing new approaches and practitioners reporting on their experience with the strengths and limitations of current technologies.

Please see the USE website for further pointers related to this topic.

Topics of Interest
The workshop is intended to cover all aspects of unanticipated software evolution, from theoretical foundations to empirical studies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Formal methods, language concepts and implementation techniques for USE.
• USE support at different stages of a program’s life-cycle: compile-time, load-time and run-time.
• USE support in programming languages, component models and related infrastructures (JVM, EJB, JavaBeans, CORBA, DCOM, and .NET).
• USE support by prototype-based language concepts, reflection, and aspect-oriented approaches.
• Consistency, safety, integrity, constraint enforcement and dependency management issues.
• Learning from object-oriented databases: Application of techniques for schema evolution and instance adaptation for run-time USE.
• Experience reports on engineering for 24x7 availability and on-line software upgrades.
• Related descriptions of hard problems from a practitioner`s perspective.

Prospective authors are required to take into account the formatting guidelines.

Important dates
Attendance at the workshop is by invitation based on submitted papers, and will be limited to approximately 20 people in order to facilitate lively discussion and the exchange of ideas.

Deadline for reviewed paper submissions: October 27, 2002 (extended) Notification of acceptance or rejection: December 20, 2003 Deadline for late paper submissions: February 10, 2003 Deadline for final versions: February 17, 2003 (extended)

Late paper submissions will not enter the review process and will not be considered for publication. For late submissions, the organisers cannot guarantee a response prior to the early registration deadline.

Related Events

First International Workshop on Unanticipated Software Evolution
http://www.cs.uni-bonn.de/~gk/use/2002/

Workshop on Engineering Context-Aware Object-Oriented Systems and Environments
http://www.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/ecoose/oopsla2002/

Workshop on Engineering Complex Object-Oriented Systems for Evolution. http://www.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/ecoose/oopsla2001/