by Anthony Cleve and Romain Robbes
The seventh annual workshop of the ERCIM Working Group of Software Evolution took place in Szeged, Hungary, 5-6 September 2011. The event gathered theorists and practitioners to present and discuss the state-of-the-art in research and practice on software maintenance and evolution.
For the third year in a row, the ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution jointly organized its annual workshop on software evolution (EVOL) together with the International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (IWPSE). This year’s edition was held in conjunction with ESEC/FSE 2011, the 8th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
The workshop, co-organized by Anthony Cleve (University of Namur) and Romain Robbes (University of Chile), was dedicated to the memory of Prof. Meir M. “Manny” Lehman, who sadly passed away in December 2010. Manny Lehman was known as the “Father of software evolution”, since his seminal work with Les Belady on the development of IBM’s OS/360. Their early empirical studies gave birth to the widely known Laws of Software Evolution.
IWPSE-EVOL 2011 was the most successful workshop of ESEC/FSE 2011 with 29 participants originating from all continents. The workshop attracted 37 submissions from 87 authors. The 27 programme committee members and 16 external reviewers selected 17 submissions for presentation and publication. The accepted submissions (see workshop website for the full list) include nine full research papers, six short or position papers, and two tool demonstration papers. All accepted papers have been formally published by ACM and they have been made available in the ACM Digital Library and indexed in DBLP.
The best paper award was presented to Allan R. Gregersen and Bo N. Jørgensen from University of Southern Denmark for their paper entitled Run-Time Phenomena in Dynamic Software Updating: Causes and Effects.
The workshop also welcomed two invited speakers. The first was Prof. Nazim Madhavji, from University of Western Ontario, who gave (via skype) an unforgettable tribute speech in memory of Prof. Manny Lehman (see photo). With the help of several former collaborators, he managed to summarize, in a bit less than two hours (!), the numerous seminal contributions of Prof. Manny Lehman to the field of software evolution, thereby repositioning those contributions in their original research context.
Nazim Madhavji from University of Western Ontario gives a tribute speech in memory of Manny Lehman.
The second invited speaker was Prof. Prem Devanbu, from University of California at Davis, who gave an inspiring keynote address entitled Decremental Work, as opposed to the notion of incremental research. According to Prem, a sign of maturity for a research community is that researchers are also looking back, not just forward: besides replicating existing work, they are also challenging assumptions made in prior work. This is an exciting opportunity and direction the software evolution community should definitely try to further explore.
Invited speaker Prem Devanbu from University of California at Davis
Links:
Workshop Proceedings: http://bit.ly/pdWTAT
Workshop website: http://pleiad.cl/iwpse-evol/
Working Group website: http://wiki.ercim.eu/wg/SoftwareEvolution
Please contact:
Anthony Cleve, ERCIM Software Evolution co-chair
University of Namur, Belgium
Tel: +32 81 72 49 63
E-mail:
