English

29th Int. Conference on Software Engineering® 20 - 26 May 2007

Impact Panels

The Impact of Software Engineering Research on Industrial Practice
Time: Wednesday May 23 @ 2.30PM, Venue: Duluth Room

 

Organisers: Leon J. Osterweil, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

 

Summary
This session is intended to introduce the ICSE audience to the Impact Project, whose goals are to 1) study the impact that software engineering research has had upon software engineering practice, and 2) promulgate project findings to the community, and then broadly to industry, academe, and government. The project is being sponsored by ACM SIGSOFT, and funded by a variety of international funding sources. The project has been in operation for over six years, and preliminary reports on the project were presented at ICSE 2001 and ICSE 2002. Formal reports have begun to appear as articles in ACM TOSEM. Here at ICSE 2007 we will report on the project again in the form of a 3-session mini-track. This first session will (re)introduce the project, and outline the studies that have been completed, are underway, and are anticipated. It will also summarize some of the larger findings and understandings about research impact that have been gleaned so far from observation of the various studies. This session and the mini-track are aimed at informing the community, and also at engaging it in both the studies themselves, and the discussions of the findings. Thus, this session will conclude with ample time for discussion.

 

Session Structure
History and Goals of the Impact Project (15 minutes): Alexander Wolf
Project Study Areas (15 minutes): Carlo Ghezzi
Preliminary Findings and Insights (15 minutes): Jeff Kramer
Discussion (30 minutes)

 

The Impact of Assertion Research on Industrial Software Development
Time: Thursday May 24 @ 2.00PM, Venue: Duluth Room

 

Organisers
Lori A. Clarke, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
David S. Rosenblum, University College London

 

Summary
Assertions have a long and distinguished history in the annals of software engineering and programming language design. Indeed, the origins of formal, logical assertions about program behavior predate computers. From this beginning emerged foundational work on program verification, in which assertions were used as a means of stating expected or desired program properties. Although assertions have found many applications in software engineering over the years, one area having a significant impact on development practice is their use for automated runtime fault detection. The state of the technology for such runtime support is at the point where assertions have become first-class constructs of widely used programming languages, such as Java and C#; are supported by popular commercial and open source tools, such as Jtest and JML; and are systematically used in development. This panel will discuss the historical development of assertion technology, observations about its current industrial use, and thoughts about its future evolution and industrial application. The panelists have been selected because of their involvement in the development and application of assertion capabilities in software development.

 

Panelists
James C. Browne, University of Texas at Austin
Gary T. Leavens, Iowa State University
Bertrand Meyer, ETH and Eiffel Software
Nachi Nagappan, Microsoft Research
Sriram Sankar, Google

 

The Impact of Research on Middleware Technology
Time: Friday May 25 @ 2.00PM, Venue: Duluth Room

 

Organisers
Wolfgang Emmerich, University College London, UK
Mikio Aoyama, Nanzan University, Japan

 

Summary
The middleware market represents a sizable segment of the overall Information and Communication Technology market. In 2005, the annual middleware license revenue was reported by Gartner to be in the region of 8.5 billion US Dollars. The panel will convene to discuss the impact of research on middleware technology, such as web services, application servers, message queues, distributed objects and remote procedure call mechanisms.
With first-hand personal research and development experience on middleware, the panelists are well qualified to discuss this topic. Andrew Birrell worked at Xerox Park on the Cedar RPC mechanism, which is widely acknowledged to be the basis for all current RPC implementations and at DEC on Modula-3 Network objects that are recognized as the predecessor of Java Remote Method Invocation. Francisco Curbera is a co-author of the most important web services specification. Steven Reiss devised a broadcast message server for the Field environment, which he licensed to DEC where it became the foundation for one of the first commercial message queue implementations. Santosh Shrivastava's research in the Arjuna project led to the specification of the CORBA Object Transaction Service, which is to-date used as the foundation of the Java Transaction API in any J2EE application server. Andrew Watson worked on the definition and implementation ANSA at APM and later had a significant involvement in the standardization of CORBA as OMG Technical Director.

 

Panelists
Andrew Birrell (tbc) (Microsoft)
Francisco Curbera (IBM)
Steven Reiss (Brown University)
Santosh Shrivastava (Newcastle University)
Andrew Watson (OMG)