Viewpoints 96: An International Workshop on Multiple Perspectives in Software Development

Outline:

In conjunction with the ACM Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering a workshop will be held on viewpoints in software development.

The construction of a complex description or model involves many agents (aka participants or actors). These agents have different perspectives or views of the artifact or system they are trying to describe or model (the domain of discourse). Examples might be performance, architecture, security, and so on. These perspectives or views are partial or incomplete descriptions which arise because of different responsibilities or roles assigned to the agents. These responsibilities or roles may be organisationally defined, follow some defined structuring of the underlying artifact or system, or may reflect different modelling or descriptive capabilities. The combination of the agent and the view that the agent holds is termed a viewpoint. The study of viewpoints embraces the relations between views, between views and agents, and between agents.

The aim of the workshop is to bring research in this area together and start a dialogue on an open list of themes and issues, including:

* methods

For example, methods which deploy viewpoints and method construction using viewpoints.

* consistency, conflict resolution

For example, checking consistency, managing inconsistency between viewpoints, detecting and resolving interference or conflict among viewpoints.

* tools, infrastructure, environments

For example, tools which support various overlapping viewpoints, infrastructure for potentially distributed viewpoints and environments that structure communication between viewpoints.

* representation

For example, notations or formalisms which lend themselves to specification of partial views.

* applications

For example viewpoints applied in requirements engineering, systems architecture, implementation, viewpoints on process and workflow.

* management

For example, organising work using viewpoints, traceability and accountability among viewpoints.

Submission:

In addition to invited papers the workshop welcomes reports on work relevant to the outlined themes, particularly from those in related disciplines outside software engineering, such as the computer supported cooperative work, information and database systems interoperability and distributed artificial intelligence. These should be in the form of a short papers of between 3 and 5 pages. A workshop proceedings will be issued and selected papers considered for a Special Issue of Automated Software Engineering. A schedule will be available soon.

Organisational details:

This workshop is organised, in association and colocated with the ACM Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, by an international workshop committee. The workshop is supported by the RENOIR Network of excellence.

Questions should be directed by email to the Workshop Chair, Anthony Finkelstein at acwf@cs.city.ac.uk.