The goal of this work package is to consolidate economical and technical issues regarding the adoption or transition of system family engineering practices.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 2290

USC Center for Software Engineering: Software Architectures

WICSA 4 is the fourth international conference devoted entirely to Software Architecture. Its purpose is to bring together software engineering practitioners and researchers from industry and academia to exchange experiences, results and ideas related to all aspects of software architecture. Its mission is to strengthen and expand its role as the premier conference on architectural issues in software system design, development and maintenance, practitioners as well as academics.

The theme for WICSA-4 is the role of software architecture in the software lifecycle. With the increasing importance of software architecture, organizations realize that just designing a software architecture early in the development process is not sufficient. The software architecture needs to be used as the basis for development and evolution in all phases. This requires us to consider architecture representation during all phases, as well as means to assure architecture conformance of the overall system.

After three decades of research and practice, reuse of existing software artefacts remains the most promising approach to decrease effort for software development and evolution, increase quality of software artefacts and decrease time to market of software products. Over time, we have seen impressive improvements, in extra-organizational reuse, e.g. COTS, as well as in intra-organizational reuse, e.g. software product families.

Despite the successes that we, as a community, have achieved, several challenges remain to be addressed. The theme for this eighth meeting of the premier international conference on software reuse is the management of software variability for reusable software.

The Software Engineering Institute is proud to sponsor the third Software Product Line Conference (SPLC 2004). Software product lines represent an important and growing software development paradigm, and SPLC is a leading forum for researchers and practitioners working in the field. The conference will feature technical papers, topical panels, tutorials, workshops, demonstrations, birds-of-a-feather opportunities, and new inductions into the Software Product Line Hall of Fame.

We invite you to submit technical papers, and proposals for panels, tutorials, workshops, and demonstrations as we gather a world-class program committee. We look forward to interacting with you at SPLC 2004.

Product Line (PL) Engineering has become a major topic in industrial software engineering. While traditional software engineering approaches aim at the development of individual systems, product-line development focuses on the development of complete system families by exploiting the family members' commonalities and by controlling their variabilities. PL has been reported to provide relevant time-to-market, cost, and quality benefits.

Key to the successful development of product lines are the early steps like organizational issues, issues of PL planning, as well as issues concerning requirements modeling and management in the context of product lines.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together practitioners and researchers from the field to foster a strong exchange of ideas and experiences.

Domain-driven development (3D) has recently popularized the importance of model-based research. A broad range of new research topics in this space have emerged and are being explored in numerous contexts. At the past two OOPSLA DSVL workshops, an international group of researchers assembled to discuss topics related to modeling and domain-specific visual languages. Although these prior workshops had a wide selection of topics (including generative/transformation techniques from models to code), this version of the OOPSLA 2003 DSM workshop will focus solely on issues at the modeling level.

A contributing factor to the rising interest in modeling comes from the realization of productivity gains that have been attributed to a shift in focus toward software represented at varying degrees of abstraction. In the past, abstraction was improved when programming languages evolved towards higher levels of specification. Today, domain-specific modeling provides a trajectory for continuing to raise the description of software to more abstract levels.

Many companies are looking for ways to minimize both the costs of developing and the time to market of new members of a software rich product family (or product line). Sharing maximization and reuse of software structure and components within the product family appear to be the path to follow. The primary focus of this workshop will be on methods, techniques and tools to manage the diversity of products in a family.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together professionals from academia and industry to exchange ideas, experiences and identify obstacles and propose solutions in the domain of software family architectures. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to Experience, business, organizational, product, tools, techniques and process aspects for product families.

As for previous editions, any topic in connection with software engineering & systems engineering as well as any application area are eligible (information systems, process management, EAI, transaction processing, e-services, Web-based systems, multimedia systems, distributed systems, real-time systems, embedded systems, e-computing,...)

Papers submitted may concern industrial implementations or experiments, describe significant results from ongoing projects, or deal with socioeconomic issues associated with software & systems engineering.