Early aspects are crosscutting concerns that exist in requirements analysis, domain analysis and architecture design activities of software lifecycle. Work on early aspects focuses on systematically identifying, modularizing, and analyzing such crosscutting concerns and their impact at these early phases of the software development.

One very promising application of early aspects is in the capture and representation of variability across a product family, as was shown in the previous EA-SPLC'05 workshop. This second workshop on the application of aspects throughout the life cycle to product line development will build on the success of the EA-SPLC'05 and series of other EA workshops.

The general aim of this workshop is to facilitate cross-fertilization of ideas in product line practice, requirements engineering, domain engineering, software architecture design, and aspect-oriented software development in order to identify the problems and potential solutions and continue the maturation of Early Aspects as a discipline. The specific aim of this workshop is to stimulate integration of the work on early development activities for product lines with the work for Early Aspects.

The specific objectives of this ICSE 2008 workshop are:
(a) to stimulate integration of the work on early development activities for product lines with the work for Early Aspects;
(b) to initiate creation of an Early Aspects for Product Lines application demonstration. For this purpose we specifically invite submissions that demonstrate how the submitter's Early Aspects approach can be applied to the Arcade Game Maker Pedagogical Product Line case study, which is detailed at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/ppl/.
(c) to solicit submission of new research on early aspects, which (if related to product lines) will also be preferably demonstrated in terms of the suggested case study.


Topics of Interest include, but are not limited to:

• Early Aspects and Product Lines
  • Use of aspects for variability and commonality identification;
  • Use of aspects to represent and manage variability and commonality in product lines;
  • Use of aspects in product line requirements;
  • Use of aspects in product line domain models and architecture;
  • Use of aspects in product line composition;
  • Use of aspects for supporting product line testing;
  • Use of aspects for traceability in product lines;
• Aspect-oriented requirements engineering
  • Identification and modeling of aspects in requirements?
  • Composition of early aspects;
  • Use of requirements level aspects for conflict identification and resolution;
• Aspect-Oriented domain engineering
  • Deriving aspects from domain knowledge;
  • Composition of domain aspects;
• Mapping between aspect-oriented requirements, domain analysis and architecture
  • Formal or informal mappings
  • Language features required to support aspect mapping;
• Aspect-oriented architecture design
  • Use of aspects to reason about architectures;
  • Evaluation of alternative architectures with aspects;
• Tool support and automation for aspect-orientation
• Formalisms and notations for specifying aspects
  

Workshop format

The workshop will be highly interactive and focused on making a tangible progress by providing an overview of the current state of the art and research challenges.

Up to 3 papers from those accepted to the workshop will be selected for presentation. The presentations will be held in the morning session to seed the discussions scheduled for the rest of the day. The bulk of the workshop will be reserved for group work, discussions, and overall conclusions. Discussion topics will be collected both from the reviewers for each paper, and from the workshop participants themselves.

The participants will work in small groups, formed based on their specific interests and the previously identified topics. Each group will aim to progress on the discussion topic, for instance, by identifying possible solutions of the discussion problems; by furthering the problem understanding; by providing practical examples and motivation for the discussion topics, etc. Each group will produce a group discussion report by the end of the workshop. The last session of the workshop will be dedicated to integrating the results of the group discussions into the overall workshop results.

Post-workshop the participants will be invited to contribute to the writing of a landscape paper. This landscape paper will provide an overview of the overall state of the early aspects and products lines work.

Important dates:

• 28th of January (Apia, Samoa time) 2008: Abstract submission. Abstracts will be used for reviewer allocations
• 4th of February (Apia, Samoa time) 2008: Paper submission
• 14th of February 2008: Notifications sent to authors
• 21th of February 2008: Submission of camera-ready accepted papers
• 12th of May 2008: Workshop

Paper Submission guidelines

Prospective participants are invited to submit a 4-6 page position paper. The submissions must conform to the ICSE submission rules (http://icse08.upb.de/calls/fsguidelines.html).

All submissions will be reviewed by members of the program committee and the organizing committee for quality and relevance. Accepted papers will become part of the workshop proceedings and published on www.early-aspects.net. Papers should conform to ICSE submission standards and rules.

Submissions should be in PDF format, sent to both pinto[at]lcc.uma.es and rouza[at]comp.lancs.ac.uk.

Proceedings

Accepted papers will become part of the workshop proceedings and will also be published on workshop web site.

The present workshop is one of the 3 themed Early Aspects workshops planned for 2008. Other Early Aspects Workshops on early aspects and software product lines are planned for AOSD in Brussels, Belgium, in March/April 2008 (Early Aspects Workshop at AOSD 2008) and for SPLC in Limerick, Ireland, in September 2008. All 3 workshops aim to stimulate further research on use of early aspects for product lines domain. The workshops will also be accompanied with a call for submissions to a special issue on Early Aspects and Product Lines of the Transaction on Aspect-Oriented Software Engineering. Thus, the best papers will be invited to submit extended papers to this special issue (subject to further review by the journal).

Program Committee

Organising Committee

Primary contact is Mónica Pinto: pinto_at_lcc.uma.es

This workshop is supported by the European Network of Excellence on AOSD (AOSD-Europe)

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Updated 04 March 2008