Call for Papers

QUEVER'04

UML Workshop on QUantitative-based

Evaluation, Visualization and Refactoring

Abstract:

The main objective of this workshop is to bridge the research being produced in the areas of Evaluation, Visualization and Refactoring (briefly EVR), within the wider community of UML users. Although these areas have obvious intersections, there is no known forum where the three are addressed in conjunction. QUEVER is intended to fulfill this gap.

Design evaluation is a research area where quantitative approaches are used to detect ill-constructed or excessively complex designs and to produce models of design quality, construction or maintenance effort. Design visualization encompasses the development of techniques for graphically representing different aspects of software design, including its structure, its traceability and its evolution. Design refactoring stands for the process of iterating through a software design to improve its understandability and maintainability without modifying its original functionality. Given, for instance, a troublesome complex system, we should first use some kind of quantitative evaluation to pinpoint potential ill-structured portions of it, that in turn should be visualized for decision-making purposes and then the conclusions used to drive a design refactoring action to improve the defective characteristics found.

Originally taking place after software construction, the EVR topics have for some time now converged with the more construction-oriented area of visual modeling. The cross-fertilization is twofold: on the one hand it is beneficial to rectify possible defects as early as possible, i.e. at modeling time. The visualization of properties of existing software, on the other hand, may benefit from reusing familiar UML notations which are already well established in the Software Engineering community. Examples for both kinds of influence can be found, but they are spread over very different venues. This workshop will provide rich opportunities to intersect the vast experience in visual modeling present at the UML conference with experts from the EVR field.

During the workshop there will be some sessions for presenting position papers, a hands-on session where a cooperative problem solving approach will be applied to a proposed problem and a closing session for summarizing, evaluating and assembling the research results and for identifying future research opportunities. 

Participation in the workshop is by invitation only, i.e. based on the submission of a position paper.  All submitted position papers will be formally reviewed by the workshop organizers for originality, relevance, quality and clarity.  We specially encourage the submission of new ideas, even if not fully validated yet. All invited participants will be asked to summarize the contributions and limitations of the work they will present.

A paper-based proceedings of QUEVER’2004, including all accepted position papers, will be distributed to the participants. An electronic-based edition of the same proceedings will be made available in the workshop website.

Workshop topics:

Since QUEVER is about EVR, it is important to identify some topics, although not exhaustively, for each of those aspects. However, the aim of this workshop is not to consider those topics in isolation, for which other fora exist, but rather to combine them in pairs, thus presenting cross-fertilization concepts and applications or identifying unexplored joint research threads. A non-exhaustive list of accepted topics is included ahead, clustered in three areas.

Area ER (Evaluation and Refactoring)

Area VE (Visualization and Evaluation)

Area VR (Visualization and Refactoring)

Important dates:

• Submission deadline: August 15, 2004
• Notification of acceptance: September 3, 2004
• Camera ready version: September 19, 2004

Participant selection process:

A workshop call for papers will be issued. Potential workshop participants should submit a position paper with a size ranging typically from 3 to 5 pages long to quever@mail.di.fct.unl.pt. The submission should indicate the workshop topics covered. An invited program committee (to be announced ) will evaluate submitted position papers and a coach review process will be adopted in order to improve selected submissions. A subset of the submitted position papers will be selected for oral presentation and discussion during the workshop. All authors of submitted position papers will be invited to participate in the workshop.

Workshop plan of activities:

• Keynote speaker (1/2 hour): "The Past and the Future of EVR" (speaker to be confirmed)
• Session 1 - Evaluation and Visualization (1 hour): 2 or 3 presentations
• Morning Break (1/2 hour)
• Session 2 - Visualization and Refactoring (1 hour): 2 or 3 presentations
• Lunch Break (1,5 hours)
• Session 3 - Evaluation and Refactoring (1 hour): 2 or 3 presentations
• Hands-on session (1/2 hour): A problem to discuss / solve cooperatively
• Afternoon Break (1/2 hour)
• Closing session (1 hour): Summary of conclusions / best paper award notification / farewell to participants

Workshop duration:

One full day split in four sessions.

Number of participants:

The maximum number of participants will be 40, including the workshop organizers.

Expected workshop outputs:

The organizers will edit the workshop proceedings that will an organized collection of the reviewed versions of the submitted position papers.

Besides the proceedings, the organizers plan to launch a moderated web-based forum (discussion group) that will start with QUEVER'04 participants (direct and indirect), which will be opened to a larger audience of interested researchers.

Previous workshops on the same topics:

The organizers do not know of any other previous workshop that combined the areas of quantitative evaluation, visualization and refactoring.

Program Commitee:

• Paris Avgeriou, Luxemburg
• Markus Bauer, Germany
• Fernando Brito e Abreu, Portugal
• Dan Chiorean, Germany
• Coral Calero, Spain
• Serge Demeyer, Belgium
• Stéphane Ducasse, Switzerland
• Miguel Goulão, Portugal
• Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Canada
• Jan Hendrik Hausmann, Germany
• Michael Mattsson, Sweden
• Geert Poels, Belgium
• Houari Sahraoui, Canada
• Monique Snoeck, Belgium
• Ragnhild Van Der Straeten, Belgium

Organizer's contacts:

Fernando Brito e Abreu (fba@di.fct.unl.pt) – main contact – QUASAR Group, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Monte da Caparica, Portugal

Jan Hendrik Hausmann (hausmann@upb.de), Fakultät für Elektrotechnik, Informatik und Mathematik, Universität Paderborn, Germany

Geert Poels (geert.poels@econ.kuleuven.ac.be | gpoels@vlekho.wenk.be) – Centre for Industrial Management – Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Ghent University, Belgium

Houari A. Sahraoui (sahraouh@iro.umontreal.ca) – Département d’Informatique et Recherche Opérationnelle – Université de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Organizer's biography:

Fernando Brito e Abreu is the leader of the QUASAR research group (http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/QUASAR) and professor of object-oriented analysis, design and programming at the Computer Science Department of FCT (Lisbon New University). He holds an Electronics Engineering Diploma, a Master of Science on Computer Engineering and a PhD on Computer Science from IST (Lisbon Technical University). He has around 40 publications on conferences, workshops and newspapers and has served as program committee member, organizer, reviewer, tutorial speaker, invited speaker, panel and session chair in several conferences worldwide. He has also participated as a member of the review board of several technical journals and has coordinated and participated in several national and international R&D projects. His research interests include software engineering project management, quantitative evaluation of software quality, empirical studies in software engineering, object oriented metamodeling and software refactoring.

Jan Hendrik Hausmann is a Research and Teaching Associate in the Information Systems Group at the Universität Paderborn. His research interests are Visual Modeling Techniques, in particular metamodeling, the definition of semantics, and the application of UML to multimedia, distributed systems, and visualization. Conference and Journal publications document this work. He has performed review duties for a number of international conferences and journals and is a program committee member of the IEEE EDOC 2004 and a fellow of the EU RTN Segravis.

Geert Poels is an assistant professor in information systems at the Business Administration Department of the VLEKHO Business School, University of Sciences and Arts, Brussels, and a guest professor at the Center for Industrial Management, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). He is a former member of the Management Information Systems Group of the Department of Applied Economic Sciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He holds degrees in Business Administration and Computer Science, and a Ph.D. in Applied Economic Sciences (major: Information Systems). His research interests include software measurement theory, OO software measures, quantitative approaches to business component identification, enterprise modelling, Business Process Change and IS reengineering. Geert Poels has published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the Information and Software Technology journal, and he was a reviewer for the Annals of Software Engineering journal and the Information and Software Technology journal. Geert Poels was program chair of several conferences and co-organized several OO software metrics and CBSE workshops.

Houari A. Sahraoui is a professor at the University of Montreal (Canada). Before joining the university, he held the position of lead researcher of the software engineering group at CRIM (Research center on computer science, Montreal). He holds an Engineering Diploma from the National Institute of computer science (1990), Algiers, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Pierre & Marie Curie University, Paris, 1995. His research interests include the application of artificial intelligence techniques to software engineering, OO metrics, software quality, and software reverse and re-engineering. He has published around 50 papers in conferences, workshops and journals and edited two books. He has served as program committee member in several major conferences and as member of the editorial boards of two journals. He was the general chair of IEEE Automated Software Engineering Conference in 2003.