CALL FOR PAPERS
INFOS 2008
The 6th
International Conference on Informatics and Systems
27 – 29 March, 2008
Special Track
On
Software Engineering: Global Age
Challenges
The Software Engineering track: Global Age Challenges within the International Conference on Informatics and Systems is a chance for researchers, practitioners, and educators to exchange and discuss challenges of the coming era in the area of software engineering research, practice, and education. Software Engineering aims at facilitating a software production environment with higher productivity, higher quality, and lower cost, which is a challenge in itself. Through the last 30 years the efforts in software engineering concentrated on establishing reliable theories, techniques, standards, and tools, which is a necessary foundation for the field. Now the field is facing the challenge of how to integrate those fundamental rudiments in our existing software development environments to be more effective in meeting the rapidly increasing needs for software products.
It is our vision that software engineering in the coming era will face three main challenges. First, Global Software Development, to allow formation of teams of software development across countries, across platforms, and across diverse cultural backgrounds, who need to cooperate and coordinate their project activities to produce high quality software and to continuously maintain products. The trend has already started and the need to create support tools for information sharing through modeling, documentation, and specification techniques has presented itself as a problem to be solved. Needless to say, there is also a legal factor in this challenge.
Second challenge is bringing together academia and industry. Software engineering efforts are sometimes seen as academic or theoretical efforts rather than applied techniques. The existing work culture has developed in absence of many software standards. It is a challenge to change the work culture altering ongoing processes to improve software production environment through introducing process support tools that allow smooth flow of production as well as early detection of problems with feedback to avoid costly errors. This challenge is broader than just the development teams since it includes government rules and regulations as well as changing management styles.
Third, is the challenge on education programs of software engineering and computer science and how they should be brought together? Software engineering tends to concentrate on the applied and managerial side while CS sees the theoretical foundation. There are trends favoring separation to create two programs. Other trends see that they are parts of one program with different emphasis. Other trends see the CS as a foundation program and Software engineering as an extension. In reality, most of CS graduates work in software development industry; their lack of software engineering knowledge hurts the industry and the late change is more costly. In fact this is the current situation. So even if there is a separation, what is the core software engineering knowledge and skills that should be gained within CS programs?
We believe that this theme, with the three challenges, will affect the coming era in software engineering education and practice, as well as CS programs, for years. Thus we aim at making this track a forum for researchers, educators, practitioners, and administrators to share their contributions towards addressing those challenges, to bring their problems to be discussed, as well as their views on how should we set goals to solve the problems. This will form plans for future forums and conference tracks.
Based on this as our vision, we chose to call the theme of this software engineering, “Hand-in-Hand”. Hand-in-Hand for teams across nations and across social and business cultures to develop software together. Hand-in-Hand for academia, industry, and government organizations to set proper environment for development, sharing, and growth. Hand-in-Hand for software engineering and computer science educational programs to graduate better professionals and to give continuing education and support for the industry.
Topics
The track includes paper sessions and panel discussions. Paper sessions include
R1: Scientific research papers: reporting results of completed research projects.
R2: Research progress papers: reporting ongoing research and findings.
E1: Experience papers: reporting experimentation and measurements.
E2: Applied techniques in development: reporting applications of development techniques.
P: Position papers: presenting a personal or group position from an issue.
V: Vision papers: presenting a future vision including anticipated problems or plan.
All papers will be published in the track proceedings. Research papers will also be published in the international conference proceedings. Sessions will be classified according to paper type for fruitful discussions. R1 papers presentations are 30 min while other papers are 15 min presentations. Invited speakers will be selected for different sessions.
A panel discussion on the relationship and integration of software engineering and computer science will be held with participation from various universities and departments of computer science, information systems and engineering. Participants from public and private universities are invited to participate with position papers and the panel discussion will be open and will include open questions from public audience. The panel discussion with its position papers and recommendations will be published.
The following is a non-exhaustive
list of topics covered by the track:
·
Global Development Environments
·
Team Communication, Collaboration,
and Coordination
·
Distributed Software Engineering
·
Distributed Software Architectures
·
Distributed Business Models
·
Independent Component Development and
Collaboration
·
Reconfigurable Software Components
·
Management of Distributed Development
·
Model Based Software Development
·
Software Visualization
·
Visual & Multilingual Development
Environments
·
Document and Model Sharing and Management Tools
·
Configuration Management
·
Collaborative Knowledge Management
·
Ontology-Based & concept-based Models
·
Design Patterns and Reuse
·
Library and Open Source Application Construction
·
Program Understanding
·
Software Maintenance and Evolution
·
Validation and Verification
·
Rigorous and Formal Specification
·
Lessons Learned from Global Development
·
Anticipated Problems in Global Development
·
Integrating Software Engineering &Computer
Science Education Programs
·
Continuing Education and Training for Software
Professionals
Track Chair
Akram Salah,
Faculty of Computers and Information,
Program
Committee
Islam El-Maddah, Egypt
Emanuel Grant, USA
Galal Hassan, Egypt
Hisham Hassan, Egypt
Amr Kamel, Egypt
Kenneth Magel, USA
Hassan Reza, USA
For further information
Dr. Akram Salah, akram.Salah@fci-cu.edu.eg