1st International Workshop on the Future of Software Architecture Design Assistants

May 6th, 2015, Montréal, Canada

Workshop in conjunction with WICSA | CompArch 2015

Information about how to register is available at the WICSA homepage.

We believe that this workshop is also of interest to local software engineering and software architecture educators and particularly encourage you to participate!

Workshop Topics

Designing the software architecture of a non-trivial system is not an easy task, and it requires highly skilled and experienced people. Over the years, researchers have proposed various approaches and tools to try and help software architects with this task. One category of such approaches and tools is that of so-called "design assistants". This term loosely includes any tool that takes as input some form of requirements for the system to be architected, and potentially an initial design, and interacts with the architect to help him/her concentrate on areas of the design that could use improvement to satisfy the requirements or could be optimized to improve quality or reduce costs. The idea is to assist the architect in a partially automated way.

This workshop invites researchers and practitioners interested in the topic of software architecture design assistants in general, to:

• gather feedback on the current status and usage of such tools;
• identify areas requiring more research, thus defining a roadmap.

The workshop organizers are involved in research in this area and hope to build a community around this topic. We therefore invite position papers on any topic related to design assistants for software architecture. A position paper describes novel ideas or innovative proposals whose aim is to stimulate discussion related to experiences and ideas, rather than to present mature results.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• experience reports on designing and/or using a software architecture design assistant;
• the relevance of such tools considering the current state of research and practice;
• the kind of software architecture reasoning that could or should be supported;
• unsolved problems and areas requiring more research;
• methods and artifacts that help to inform and organize the process of design and which could be (partially) automated
• domain-specific or technology-specific architecture design assistants
• …

Possible activities that design assistants support could be, among others:

• establishing if an architecture meets its requirements;
• assigning responsibilities to components;
• optimizing software architecture for quality attributes;
• applying patterns, styles, and reference architectures in architecture designs;
• detecting anti-patterns or bad smells in architecture designs;
• handling trade-offs between multiple quality attributes;
• …

Workshop Program

We are looking forward to the presentation of four very interesting papers

• "Assisting Software Designers to Identify and Solve Performance Problems" by Davide Arcelli and Vittorio Cortellessa
• "Design Assistant for NoSQL Technology Selection" by John Klein and Ian Gorton
• "Decision Buddy: Tool Support for Constraint-Based Design Decisions during System Evolution" by Sebastian Gerdes, Mohamed Soliman and Matthias Riebisch
• "Software Architecture Design Assistants Need Controlled Efficiency Experiments: Lessons Learned from a Survey" by Sebastian Lehrig and Steffen Becker

After the paper presentations, we will have a discussion session.

Organizers

• Roger Champagne (ETS, Canada)
• Anne Koziolek (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)

Program Committee members