Conference Organization

Conference Chair: Allan Kelly

Program Chair: Till Schümmer

Focus Group Chair: Tim Wellhausen

Web Chair: Michael Weiss

Program Committee: Kristian Elof Sørensen, Arno Haase, Haase Consulting, Ademar Aguiar, Lise Hvatum, Allan Kelly, Michael Weiss, Andy Longshaw, Klaus Marquardt, Till Schümmer, Didi Schütz, Tim Wellhausen, Jim Siddle, Uwe Zdun

 EuroPLoP 2008 Focus Groups

• Junkies Like Us
  Organized by Andreas Rueping
  With Web 2.0 becoming more and more popular, people are giving more and more information about themselves away on the Internet: in social networks, blogs, chats and wikis. Here’s a few questions to start with:
  • Have you ever mentioned your favourite books, music, or movies on your homepage or on your personal profile in a social network?
  • Have you ever publicly reviewed a book, a CD, or a restaurant?
  • Have you ever put photographs of you online for the world to see?
  • Have you ever offered a political opinion in an online forum?
• Most of us will probably answer several of these questions with “yes”. The younger generation especially seems to enjoy social networks and gives infor- mation about their lifestyle away freely. Have we, or will we, become Web junkies who deliberately put more or less their entire lives online? When I look at the material that people put online, I’m torn between two positions. Sometimes I’m impressed with how candid people are when they present themselves to the world. Sometimes I’m scared that all our concerns for privacy might vanish one day.Is the social Web a good thing or a bad?

  On the one hand, there’s the idea of a democratic Web, the perspective of a more open society, and the fun that comes from actively participating in today’s most popular medium.

  On the other hand, there’s the unpleasant prospect of endless personalised advertising and the possible danger that virtually anyone can track you down and collect arbitrary information about you.

  This focus group aims to bring together people who are interested in the non- technical perspective of the social Web.

  The plan is to discuss the following questions:

  • What are the benefits of the social Web?
  • What are the immediate dangers, and what are the possible long-term implications?
  • To which extent can we (the participants) reach agreement regarding what’s good and what’s bad? Do we have similar or fundamentally different positions?
  • Can we identify personal practices for using the social Web? Or strategies for further evolving it? If so, which? Can we even come up with patterns? The focus group will be a forum for participants to share their insight, offer their opinions and discuss possible strategies. The goal is to collect and classify the ideas expressed by the participants and to make the results available as a focus group report.
• No position paper is required for this focus group, but if you plan to attend, I’d be grateful if you could drop me a line at andreas.rueping@rueping.info, preferably by mid June. Anyone interested in co-organising this focus group, please get in touch with me as soon as possible.

• Efficient and Effective Software System Integration, beyond Continuous Integration
  Organized by Juergen Salecker
  The moments of truth in software development are very often the moments of system integration. Here the wheat is separated from the chaff. Ineffective organizations spend a large amount of time in finding root causes of integration problems. Effective software development anticipates common integration issues. Those issues are how to detect potential harmful semantic dependencies and their impact in advance, or being able to manage interface changes proactively. The focus group should be used to mining the existing knowhow about efficient and effective system integration.

• Domain-specific Complex Event and Rule Patterns
  Organized by Adrian Paschke, and Rainer von Ammon
  Complex Event Processing (CEP) and business rules are two emerging trends leading to a fundamental change in IT service and applications development and use. Instead of building monolithic systems, applications will be assembled in a flexible service-oriented way, possibly distributed over the internet.
  CEP is an emerging enabling technology to achieve actionable, situational knowledge from distributed systems and data sources in real-time or almost real- time. Applications of CEP technologies arise in manifold domains such as Finance/Banking, Logistics, Automotive, Telco, Life science and the application scenarios range from, e.g., fraud detection, supply chain event monitoring, business activity monitoring and IT service management/governance to adaptive or self-autonomous reactive systems capable of handling e.g. pandemia situations.
  Business rules are rapidly gaining popularity as a means to separate the business logic from the operational processes and applications. They allow specifying business knowledge in a way that is understandable by ‘the business’, but also executable by rule engines, thus bridging the gap between business and technology.
  According to Gartner’s emerging technology hype cycle CEP and business rules are considered as the main prerequisites for many other emerging technologies such as predictive business enterprise networks (service supply chains), real-time adaptive enterprise or autonomic IT systems. They might be applied separated or work in tandem thus enabling semi-autonomous decisions and reactions according to detected complex events, e.g. in order to handle and monitor business process workflows in a dynamic and flexible way.
  Reference models for CEP and business rules offer the potential for an additional increase (1) in efficiency, aimed at cheaper and faster delivery of CEP and rule-based systems for specific domains, and (2) in reusability of successful CEP and business rules solutions in various domains. The models predefine a common frame of reference for a certain application domain, which can be customized to obtain models for specific applications in that domain. Design patterns as more or less formalized descriptions of generic solutions to certain problem classes have become a wide-spread mean to transfer knowledge about successful designs. Hence, they qualify as an adequate representation format for the description of CEP patterns and rule patterns describing e.g. generic rule-based solutions for specifying business policies. A pattern language of domain-specific CEP patterns and rule patterns could establish a way to efficiently communicate about successful domain-specific CEP and rule-based solutions and reuse them for devising concrete implementation solutions in potentially multiple domains. That is, the advantage of CEP and rule patterns is their predefined, reusable, and dynamically customizable nature allowing the designer to reuse existing experience for building new CEP and rulebased applications.

• Heuristics
  Organized by Klaus Marquardt and Kevlin Henney
  Despite all metrics captures, few of the important things in your project are measured by hard numbers. When is your project doing OK? When do you need to intervene? Is your architecture and design doing fine? Seasoned developers have grown a feeling on quality and success criteria, even before something is provably right or wrong, good or bad. This focus group is to explore these heuristics.

• Pragmatic and Systematic Approaches in Applying Patterns
  Organized by Paris Avgeriou, Neil B. Harrison, and Uwe Zdun
  The application of the different types of patterns in practice has not met the expectations of the patterns community. Most practitioners are aware of the GoF patterns and some idioms in specific programming languages or platforms, but few of them work systematically with patterns for architecture, analysis, process etc. The discipline of software engineering is significantly lacking in incorporating patterns in standardized and well-proven processes, methods, techniques and tools. This thematic track aims at studying the application of patterns in practice and enforcing the links between the patterns community and the practitioners. It envisions papers that present not only patterns but also their practical applications in real industrial projects, as well as papers on systematizing the application of patterns. It aims at stimulating a general discussion on how to disseminate the patterns literature more in the higher education and training. It hopes to provide visibility to research attempts for integrating patterns in software engineering industrial practices.