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CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on
Variability in Software Product Line Architectures
(VARI-ARCH)

http://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/events/variarch/
contact: vari-arch@cs.kuleuven.be

EXTENDED Submission deadline: June 1st, 2010

Copenhagen, Denmark, August 23, 2010

Co-located with
The 4th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2010)
http://www.ecsa2010.org/

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WORKSHOP GOAL

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the software product line community and software architecture community to identify critical challenges and progress the state-of-the-art on variability in software product line architectures.


INTRODUCTION & MOTIVATION

The product line architecture is key to the success of a software product line. In contrast to single system architectures, a product line architecture is designed to underpin multiple systems. A product line architecture reifies the commonalities between the various products and also clearly delineates the variability that is allowed between products. As such a product line architecture is paramount to predictably achieve the qualities of the various products in a software product line.

Two prominent communities that have been studying product line architectures are the community on software product lines and the community on software architecture. Whereas both communities have been successful in addressing some of the challenges of product line architectures, persistent challenges remain, in particular concerning variability in product line architectures.

In the software product line community, it is generally acknowledged that variability of a product line should be captured explicitly. Many variability modeling techniques exist, but most of those techniques capture variability relative to generic/holistic concepts as "features" or "decisions" and do not specifically focus on variability relative to the software architecture of the product line.

In the software architecture community, it is generally acknowledged that a software architecture should be described using multiple views. Each view captures the architecture using (a) suitable model(s) from the perspective of a specific stakeholder and his/her concerns. In contrast to single system architectures, variability is a key quality of product line architectures. Although some work exists in this area, it is under-investigated how viewpoints/views can be used to support variability of product line architectures.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest to VARI-ARCH include, but are not limited to:
- Modeling variability using architectural views/viewpoints
- Mechanisms/tactics/patterns/styles for variability in product line architectures
- Evaluating variability in product line architectures
- Resolving architectural variability during product derivation
- Traceability of variability in product line architectures.
- Conformance of products to the product line architecture
- Practical and industrial examples of variability in product line architectures
- Relation between variability and (other) quality attributes

VARI-ARCH welcomes the submission of theoretical, experimental, methodological as well as application papers which focus on the topics outlined above. Papers may report on completed work, descriptions of work-in-progress, or discussion topics.


IMPORTANT DATES

- Submission of papers: June 1st, 2010
- Author notification: June 27, 2010
- Submission of camera-ready paper: July 10, 2010


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES & PUBLICATION

Submissions can be either regular papers and short papers:
- Regular papers should be between 6 and 8 pages long, including the text, figures and references
- Short papers should be between 2 and 4 pages long, including the text, figures and references

The submissions must be formatted according to ACM conference proceedings style. PDF format is required.

Papers can be submitted via EasyChair "VARI-ARCH 2010":
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=variarch2010

Accepted papers will be published in a second volume of the ECSA 2010 conference proceedings with an ISBN number and through ACM digital library.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

The list of PC members includes both people from the software architecture community and people from the software product line community:

- Pierre America, Philips Research, The Netherlands
- Sven Apel, University of Passau, Germany
- David Benavides, University of Seville, Spain
- Jan Bosh, Intuit, USA
- Felix Bachmann, Software Engineering Institute, USA
- Laurence Duchien, INRIA, France
- Rich Hilliard, USA
- Philippe Kruchten, University of British Columbia, Canada
- Patricia Lago, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- Klaus Pohl, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
- Klaus Schmid, University of Hildesheim, Germany
- Michael Stal, Siemens AG, Germany
- Eddy Truyen, DistriNet Labs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
- Andrzej Wasowski, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Uwe Zdun, Vienna University of Technology, Austria


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

- Alexander Helleboogh (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
- Paris Avgeriou (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
- Nelis Boucké (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
- Patrick Heymans (University of Namur, Belgium)