OVERVIEW

Our knowledge as to how to solve software engineering problems is increasingly being encapsulated in tools. These tools are at their strongest when they operate in a pre-existing development environment. This approach allows integration with existing elements such as compilers, debuggers, profilers, and visualizers as well as numerous other development and, often, runtime tools.

Building tools as ‘plug-ins’ can be challenging. How do they interact with the core environment? How do they interact with one another, especially since each developer may choose a different set of plug-ins. How can we share tools across different and future core development environments? This workshop is intended to all those interested in developing tools as plug-ins for IDEs, middle-wares and browsers.

We look for position papers spotting the medium and long term challenges of developing tools as plug-ins as well as research contributions identifying recent successful tools as plug-ins, characteristics of good plug-ins and reports of the main difficulties in implementing plug-ins in current platforms.

The main focus will be on fostering creative discussion between the participants, on specific themes. We will examine the categories of problems that are best solved using plug-ins and look at key challenges.

TOPICS

The workshop aims to address the following issues:

identify recent successful tools as plug-ins
categorize the characteristics of good plug-ins
understand interoperability requirements to making tools available across platforms
list which tools lend themselves best to the plug-in approach
specify the medium and long term challenges of tools as plug-ins
Thus, we are more concerned in this workshop with understanding the characteristics and creation of tools as plug-ins, than of the tools themselves.

Tools can come from many areas. Examples would be:

Computer supported cooperative work
Empirical software engineering
Engineering secure software
Mining software repositories
Programming languages and design
Software dependability, safety, and reliability
Software engineering education
Software processes
Software requirements engineering
Software testing and analysis
Software verification
Software debugging
Software profiling
Static/Dynamic analysis and bug-finding

SUBMISSION

Papers submitted for consideration should not have been published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the duration of consideration.

All papers must conform to the ICSE 2012 Format and Submission Guidelines (IEEE Computer Society Format style) and not exceed the 6 pages limit, including all text, references, appendices and figures. Papers must be written in English submitted in PDF format. Papers must be submitted electronically through EasyChair: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=topi2012

Every submission will be reviewed by at least three members in the program committee and accepted on merit. After the review process is finished, papers will be categorized as follows:
The best papers will be accepted as full papers (6 pages). Some of them will also be invited to submit an extended version for inclusion in the Software: Practice and Experience journal (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-024X)
A second group will be accepted as short papers (2 pages).
The rest of the papers will not be accepted.
All accepted papers will be published in ICSE Workshops Volume. Those authors of accepted papers who present concrete plug-ins or tools will be invited to showcase them during a demo session.

Papers accepted as short paper will be presented as posters during a poster session.

ORGANIZATION

Program Co-chairs:

Diego Garbervetsky (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Sunghun Kim (The Hong Kong Univ of Science and Technology, China)

Program Committee:

Michael Barnett (Microsoft Research, USA)
Karin Breitman (PUC-Rio, Brazil)
Cristian Cadar (Imperial College London, UK)
Arie van Deursen (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Werner Michael Dietl (University of Washington, USA)
Juan Pablo Galeotti (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Sam Malek (George Mason University, USA)
Marija Mikic-Rakic (Google, USA)
Mark Marron (IMDEA Software, Spain)
Martin Nordio (ETH, Switzerland)
Martin Robillard (McGill University, Canada)
Suresh Thummalapenta (IBM Research, India)
Tom Zimmermann (Microsoft Research, USA)
Steering Committee:
Judith Bishop (Microsoft Research, USA)
Karin Brietman (PUC-Rio, Brazil)
David Notkin (University of Washington, USA)
Diego Garbervetsky (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Sunghun Kim (The Hong Kong Univ of Science and Technology)