Traceability in model-driven safety critical software engineering

We welcome you to the Twenty-Eighth International Conference on Software Engineering and Shanghai, China. This is the first instance of the ICSE conference series to be held in China, and it is an exciting time and place for ICSE 2006. The conference brings researchers, educators, practitioners and students together to present, exchange ideas and engage in discussions about the recent and exciting innovations and research in software engineering. Exciting sessions on practical experience, educational issues, and doctoral and new faculty symposia have been organized. The conference also includes a wide variety of tutorial, workshops and demonstration offerings. Finally, since research and markets in our host country China are continuously growing, ICSE includes a separate Far East Track for discussions on the contributions and challenges of our Chinese colleagues. We trust that this mix will provide interesting and stimulating offerings to all members of our growing community. The technical program committee is pleased to present this conference proceeding that contains the research papers of the technical program for ICSE 2006. The technical program for this conference focuses on new and innovative software engineering contributions in theory, formal methods, system building and empirical studies. The papers represent an alluring array of topics, including software design, architecture, reuse, testing, analysis, processes and formal methods. Because of the growing number of paper submission and the resulting large program committees in the past, we instituted a new two-phase reviewing process this year. Our program committee had 36 members. In the first phase, each submitted paper was reviewed by 3 reviewers: 2 from the program committee and an external reviewer from the software engineering community. We had 265 external reviewers who contributed 370 reviews for this phase. Those papers receiving the best reviews were considered in the second phase. A total of 99 papers entered the second phase. Each of these papers was reviewed by another program committee member. Thus, each accepted paper had a total of 4 reviews (3 reviews from pc members and 1 review from an external reviewer). Each rejected paper had at least 3 reviews. The pc members reviewed 24-25 papers in the two phases, a reasonable number. We feel that this system worked very well. The program committee met for two days in December, 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany. By the end of the meeting, a consensus emerged for the 36 papers in this proceedings (9% of the total submissions). There were many high quality submissions that could not be accommodated in the program; hopefully a revised version will be published elsewhere. In addition to the papers, we organized four invited sessions. One invited session focuses on empirical studies, an increasingly important component of software engineering research and practice. We also have an invited panel that addresses the value and practice of formal methods. Since software engineering techniques are growing in importance in challenging safety critical domains, we included two invited sessions: one on software engineering for automotive engineering and the other on software engineering for assisted living. We are very pleased that a notably diverse and outstanding group of three leaders of the software engineering community have agreed to present keynote speeches. The opening day keynote will be presented by Prof. Yang Fuqing, from Peking University, a woman who has been at the very forefront of the software engineering communities of research and practice in China for decades. Her perspectives on the past and future of software engineering in China will be complemented by a keynote on similar themes presented on the second day. This second keynote will be delivered by Prof. Barry Boehm, from the University of Southern California, USA. His talk will review the history of software engineering research and practice in the West over the past decades, and project it forward into the 21st century. Finally, the keynote speaker on the third day, Mr. Reinhold Achatz, from Siemens Corp., will present a complementary view of software engineering research and practice, as viewed from the perspective of one of the great multinational corporations, based in Europe. We are truly excited at the prospect that these three keynotes will provide a searching multidimensional view of our community at this time of historic convergence of communities. The continued success and high quality of the ICSE conference series would not be possible without the help and support of the software engineering community. First, we would like to gratefully acknowledge and thank all of the authors who submitted papers. We especially thank the program committee members for their efforts and commitments in reviewing the papers and securing reviews from external reviewers. They put in an extraordinary amount of their time to provide thoughtful and knowledgeable reviews. The exceptionally strong technical program represented by the papers in this proceeding could not be possible without their efforts.

Context: In the last years, the Grey Literature (GL) had a notable increase in interest in diverse areas of knowledge. In Software Engineering (SE), with the advance of social media, the SE practitioners are heavy consumers of GL, opposite to traditional research papers, such as the Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Problem: Despite the increase of numbers of SLRs, some researchers claim the lack of connection to the practice of SE, due to the lack of evidence derived from SE practitioners. Goal: Introduce methods and techniques to support a Grey Literature Review (GLR) in SE, aiming to approximate the literature review to the practice of SE. Method: First, we will investigate how secondary studies use GL; Second, we will employ a survey with researchers of SLRs and SE practitioners; Third, we will analyze the use of GL according to the context; Fourth, we will review the GL source in SE; Finally, we will propose a guideline to help SE researchers and practitioners to conduct the GLR. Preliminary findings: We have initiated the tertiary study conducting the manual (4,875 studies) and automatic (6,279 studies) searches. We eliminated those that were not an article, and also those were not written in English, remaining 8,019 potential studies. Currently, we are applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Context: The REBSE international workshops are concerned with exploring the adaptation and use of the evidence-based paradigm in software engineering research and practice, through a mix of presentations and discussion. Objectives: These were to explore both experience with, and potential for, evidence-based software engineering (EBSE); to consider how this might affect empirical practices in software engineering; and to work towards creating a community of researchers to practice and promote EBSE. Method: Three sessions were dedicated to a mix of presentations and interactive discussion, while the fourth was dedicated to summarising progress and identifying both issues of concern and actions to pursue. Conclusions: While we identified a number of issues, a key need is clearly to have a central repository to both provide information and to maintain a record of activity in this area.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) has allowed several disciplines to become more mature by emphasizing the use of evidence from well-designed and well-conducted research in decision-making. Its application in SE, Evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) can help to bridge the gap between academia and industry by bringing together academic rigor and research of practical relevance. To achieve this, it seems necessary to improve its adoption. We sought both to study the attitudes towards EBSE of stakeholders working in a government agency (GA) and to assess whether knowledge of EBSE would impact their working practices. We conducted a multi-stage field investigation in an Uruguayan national GA that is responsible for digital policies. First, we organized an EBSE awareness lecture and we collected and analyzed participants’ perceptions of the value and limitations of EBSE. Sixteen months later, in a second stage, we contacted the agency and asked participants whether they had made use of the information about EBSE we presented to them. Initially, participants reported that EBSE seemed useful for tackling challenging problems and, in particular, considered its use appropriate given the agency’s responsibilities. Perceived barriers to EBSE adoption were the need for institutional support, the lack of government practice reports, inadequate skills or motivation, the cost of conducting systematic reviews, and the lack of evidence about emerging issues. In the follow-up survey, although the participants were not undertaking systematic reviews themselves, many reported improvements in how they searched for and evaluated information to support their work. Our study presents some insights to better understand EBSE adoption. With the exception of GA-specific issues, perceived value and barriers to adoption were consistent with those reported in software engineering and other disciplines. Our follow-up study confirms the potential value of evidence in the context of IT regulatory and government bodies.

Clean room software engineering is a formal software development method that can strictly engineer software development and eliminate defects before they can cause serious harm. The clean room software engineering model has its own advantages and disadvantages in use. To use it in traditional software engineering, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between it and traditional software engineering methods and practices. Based on the technology and principles of the clean room software process, this paper gets the advantages and disadvantages of the clean room. Corresponding the traditional method-based software process to the key technology of the clean room, making the traditional management-based software engineering method and the tailored clean room compatible, and the software engineering practice of the clean room software process is compared with the traditional software engineering practice. To discuss the clean room and traditional software engineering, in order to expand the use of clean room methods, improve the clean room software process, and improve the quality of software.

The results of a survey carried out between November 1995 and March 1996 are given. The aim of the survey was to see exactly how widely software engineering techniques were being adopted in the UK today. The rationale behind the survey was simple: to see which of a selected set of software engineering techniques were being used. The techniques included in the survey were: methods and methodologies, standards, CASE tools and software engineering process quality manuals. Several other general questions were also asked. The results were surprising, and showed a considerable lack of use of software engineering practices, despite evidence of a strong urge to conform with international standards.

We live in a world in which our safety depends on software-intensive systems. This is the case for the aeronautic, automotive, medical, nuclear, and railway sectors as well as many more. Organizations everywhere are struggling to find cost-effective methods to deal with the enormous increase in size and complexity of these systems, while simultaneously respecting the need to ensure their safety. Consequently, we're witnessing the ad hoc emergence of a renewed discipline of safety-critical software systems development as a broad range of software engineering methods, tools, and frameworks are revisited from a safety-related perspective. The rise of these complex, critical systems has spawned several recent initiatives to promote reuse, both of the technical artifacts and the artifacts and procedures that certify their suitability for use in safety-related contexts. One unmistakable trend is a strong interest in applying model-driven engineering techniques to safety-critical systems development over the entire life cycle.

This study was designed as a preliminary investigation of the practices of software engineers within New Zealand, including their use of development tools. The project involved a review of relevant literature on software engineering and CASE tools, the development and testing of an interview protocol, and structured interviews with five software engineers. This paper describes the project, presents the findings, examines the results in the context of the literature and outlines on-going funded work involving a larger survey.

The developments in conversational AI raised urgent questions about the future direction of many aspects of society, including computing education. The first reactions to the fast-paced evolution of conversational agents were varied: Some announced "the end of programming," while others considered this "premature obituary of programming." Some adopted a defensive approach to detecting the use of conversational AI and avoiding an increase in plagiarism, while others questioned, "So what if ChatGPT wrote it?" Nevertheless, questions arise about whether computing education in its current form will still be relevant and fit for purpose in the era of conversational AI. Recognizing these diverse reactions to the advent of conversational AI, this paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse by exploring the current state through three perspectives in a dedicated literature review: adoption of conversational AI in (1) software engineering education specifically and (2) computing education in general, and (3) a comparison with software engineering practice. Our results show a gap between software engineering practice and higher education in the pace of adoption and the areas of use and generally identify preliminary research on student experience, teaching, and learning tools for software engineering.

The open source movement has created and uses a set of software engineering tools with features that fit the characteristics of open source development processes. To a large extent, the open source culture and methodology are conveyed to new developers via the toolset itself, and through the demonstrated usage of these tools on existing projects. The rapid and wide adoption of open source tools stands in stark contrast to the difficulties encountered in adopting traditional Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools. This chapter explores the characteristics that make these tools adoptable and discusses how adopting them may influence software development processes.

This article considers parallel systems to be a broader topic than the mapping of single algorithms to parallel processors. This strategy allows for a discussion of general principles, rather than the techniques that apply to specific machines. Much of the present parallel hardware industry provides machines that do not support a parallel machine model as needed for software engineering practices, therefore, this strategy is necessary. Massively parallel machines are organized for selected algorithm approaches that attain high performance at the sacrifice of software productivity because unacceptable application constraints result when building complete parallel systems with multiple algorithms and application domains. For these machines the goals of software engineering practices cannot be met. Some parallel machines do support a suitable parallel machine model for software engineering, but these have a maximum processor count which limits peak performance. To better discuss parallel systems two styles are introduced: intensive and extensive . Extensive concurrent applications are those that are too complex and interrelated to have a recognizable and predictable response structure. Intensive algorithms are those that have predictable data and control flow paths. Both styles require software engineering methods and tools and are sufficiently different from each other so that the style must be stated for any rational and reasonable discussion.

Processes, challenges and recommendations of Gray Literature Review: An experience report

This paper considers the current state of software engineering for parallel systems. A review of existing approaches and techniques identifies inadequacies. Recent work on design, verification and automated support is outlined. The next generation of embedded and distributed technologies will compound the problems through increased demand and diversity. This paper discusses the implications for the progression of current techniques into new methods for future software engineering of parallel systems.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center situated as a college‐level unit at Carnegie Mellon University with facilities in Pittsburgh, PA and Arlington, VA. The SEI was created in 1984 by the U.S. Department of Defense to mature and transition new technology to industry so that the government could acquire software‐intensive systems from a broader, more capable contractor base. The SEI works to transform software engineering from an ad‐hoc, labor‐intensive activity to a managed, technology‐supported engineering discipline. The SEI's objectives are to accelerate the introduction and widespread use of high‐payoff software engineering practices and technology by identifying, evaluating, and maturing promising or underused technology and practices; maintain a long‐term competency in software engineering and technology transition; enable government and industry organizations to make measured improvements in their software engineering practices by working with them directly; and foster the adoption and sustained use of standards of excellence for software engineering practice. The institute explores promising solutions to potentially significant problems, selects the best candidate solutions, and works on them to determine their value. In some cases, the SEI works to overcome the limitations that prevent a solution from being of general use in the software community. Finally, the SEI moves mature solutions of proven value into widespread use; examples include the Capability Maturity Model® for Software (SW‐CMM®), and a model curriculum for a master's degree program in software engineering that has been adopted by universties across the country. SEI activities are grouped into two principal areas: software engineering management practices and software engineering technical practices.

For a long time scientists have been committed to describe and organize information acquired by observations from the field. To improve the comprehension and testability of the observed information, Bacon’s works proposed to organize the way that the experiences should be structured and somehow formalized, starting with the experimental method idea. From that point in time, the ideas regarding experimentation have been explored and evolved into different scientific areas, including physics, agriculture, medicine, engineering and social sciences among others. It has not been different in Software Engineering. By applying the scientific method to organize their experimental studies, software engineers have intensively worked to understand the application and evolution of software processes and technologies. Acquiring knowledge through different categories of experimental studies has supported researchers and practitioners to build a Software Engineering body of knowledge. Families of studies start to be planed and shared among the research community, composing a common research agenda to enlarge such body of knowledge. Based on this, evidence based software engineering is becoming a reality. Nowadays, besides the experimental studies, the experimentation approach represents an important tool to allow the transfer of software technology to the industry and to improve software processes.