MACS 2005
First International Workshop on the
Modeling and Analysis of Concerns in Software

[Theme and Goals] [Call for Papers] [Important Dates] [Program] [Organization] [ICSE Home]

NEWS: [22 September 2005] The workshop is over. The proceedings and summary were published in the July 2005 on-line issue of Software Engineering Notes (volume 30, issue 4).

Theme and Goals

Most software design, implementation, and modification activities are organized, explicitly or implicitly, around the idea of concerns. Concerns of interest during software engineering activities typically include features, non-functional requirements, low-level mechanisms (e.g., caching), and many other concepts. Programming language-supported constructs like modules, classes, and aspects enable the encapsulation of certain concerns. Unfortunately, because of the limitations of programming languages, structural degradation due to repeated changes, and the continual emergence of new issues, the code implementing concerns is often found to be scattered and tangled throughout the system. Studies and experience have shown that the scattering and tangling of concerns greatly increase the difficulty of evolving software in a correct and cost-effective manner.

Although relatively mature aspect-oriented programming technologies are now available that allow developers to encapsulate a greater number of concerns, many of the research questions that applied to object-oriented and procedural systems carry over to aspect-oriented systems: How can we efficiently discover how a concern is realized in a system? How can we explicitly capture and preserve informal knowledge developers have about the realization of scattered concerns? How can we best represent scattered and tangled concerns to help developers understand and modify them? How can we (semi-)automatically refactor a scattered concern in its own function, class, or aspect? These and other questions have been the focus of research projects that have had significant visibility at recent software engineering conferences.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners with interest and experience in the development of techniques for modeling and analyzing concerns whose realization is scattered in the various artifacts composing a software system, and to explore the potential for integration and interoperability in concern analysis and modeling research. Specific areas of interests include:

Call for Papers

We invite position papers of 2 to 5 pages that describe ongoing work, new ideas, or recent experiences within the scope of the workshop. The papers must conform to the ICSE 2005 paper format and must not have been previously published or submitted elsewhere.

Papers will be reviewed by different members of the program committee and will be selected for presentation based on relevance to the workshop topics and potential to generate interesting discussions. Papers accepted for presentation at the workshop will be distributed electronically before and during the conference, and will be published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference (in Software Engineering Notes).

Important Dates

Submission of workshop papers28 February 2005 (closed)
Notification of workshop papers21 March 2005
Submission of publication-ready papers4 April 2005
Workshop date16 May 2005

Workshop Program

Speakers are in bold in the author list.

8:00-9:00Breakfast
9:00-10:30Workshop Introduction (30 minutes)
   • Word of Welcome (Robillard)
   • Agenda and Goals of the Workshop (Robillard)
   • Modeling Concerns with FEAT and CME (Robillard, Sutton)

Extended Presentation (30 minutes)
   • A Model of Software Plans (Painter, Coppit)

Short Presentations (30 minutes)
   • Mapping Concern Space to Software Architecture: A Connector-Based Approach (Liu, Lutz, Thompson)
   • Separating Architectural Concerns to Ease Program Understanding (Jakobac, Medvidovic, Egyed)
10:30-11:00Break
11:00-12:30Extended Presentation (30 minutes)
   • ActiveAspect: Presenting Crosscutting Structure (Coelho, Murphy)

Short Presentations (45 minutes)
   • Concern Managements for Model Compiler Construction (Ubayashi, Tamai)
   • A Model-Driven Approach to Enforce Crosscutting Assertion Checking (Zhang, Gray, Lin)
   • Pattern Transformation for Two-Dimensional Separation of Concerns (Wu, Bryant, Gray, Mernik)

General Discussion (15 minutes)
12:30-2:00Lunch
2:00-3:30Extended Presentation (30 minutes)
   • Using Language Clues to Discover Crosscutting Concerns (Shepherd, Tourwé, Pollock)

Short Presentations (45 minutes)
   • Locating Crosscutting Concerns in the Formal Specification of Distributed Reactive Systems (Pazos-Arias, Garcí-Duque, López-Nores, Barragáns-Martínez)
   • Separation of Concerns in Software Product Line Engineering (Saleh, Gomaa)
   • An Exploration of How Comments are Used for Marking Related Code Fragments (Ying, Wright, Abrams)

General Discussion (15 minutes)
3:30-4:00Break
4:00-5:30Short Presentations (45 minutes)
   • An Approach to Aspect Refactoring Based On Crosscutting Concern Types (Marin, Moonen, van Deursen)
   • Separation of Concerns for Evolving Systems: A Stability-Driven Approach (Hamza)
   • Concern Patterns and Analysis in Cosmos (Memmert)

General Discussion and Wrap-Up (45 minutes)

Organization

Workshop Organizers:

Martin Robillard, McGill University, Canada
Peri Tarr, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Program Committee:

Siobhán Clarke (Trinity College, Ireland)
Yvonne Coady (University of Victoria, Canada)
David Coppit (The College of William and Mary, USA)
William Griswold (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Rainer Koschke (University of Bremen, Germany)
Juri Memmert (JPM Design, Germany)
Gail Murphy (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Harold Ossher (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA)
Arie van Deursen (CWI and Delft University, The Netherlands)