Workshop on Software Engineering for Sustainable Systems

Date: 14th or 15th of  March, 2016 (to be confirmed)

Location: University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain (to be held at International Conference on Modularity 2016)

Today software is a key driver for change in business and society, in changing life styles as well as business practices. Thus, decisions on what to support through software and how to design it have a major influence on how the physical environment is shaped around software systems.

As sustainability has become a key challenge for the humanity, we must ensure that our software systems are well equipped in supporting sustainable practices. For this sustainability has to be understood and implemented into software systems across the whole spectrum of software development and exploitation activities.

Sustainability is often defined at the capacity (of a socio-technical system) to endure. This has a particular relevance to those working on new modularity and composition techniques, which too aim to ensure that thus developed software systems will endure for a long time. Moreover, for software to ensure and be useful for a long time, so the businesses, processes and communities using that software should endure too.

Thus, this workshop aims to initiate a discussion on topics of capturing, modularly representing, and implementing sustainability-related concerns throughout software engineering life cycle: from requirements engineering through architecture design, implementation, dedicated language engineering, testing, and deployment activities. Software systems are a powerful tool in transforming societies, but they can only support transformations for which they have been developed. We aim to establish a community of researchers working on engineering software that supports transformation towards sustainability.

The Key Objective of this Workshop is to establish a community of researchers and practitioners interested in collaborating on the topic of sustainability in software engineering. This community will identify the specific challenges that software engineers face in addressing sustainability, set out the agenda on Software Engineering for Sustainability and start on the systematic resolution of the identified challenges.

The workshop solicits a number of contribution types:

  • full papers up to 10 pages,
  • short papers of 4 pages,
  • posters with a 2-page abstract, and
  • user studies/experiments for the duration of an hour with a maximum description of 6 pages (to be carried out during the workshop).

Accepted workshop papers will be published in both the electronic conference proceedings and in the ACM Digital Library. Papers are to be submitted using the ACM formatting style (sigplanconf, 9pt)

To submit you papers please email your submissions to rc256@le.ac.uk.

Example Topics to be discussed at the workshop include, but are not limited to:

  • Identification and modularisation of suitability concerns in requirements, architecture, and design;
  • Development of dedicated modelling and programming languages that further sustainability;
  • Development of metrics and measurement procedures for evaluating sustainability of a given software system, as well as its impact on its broader environment;
  • Techniques to support modular reasoning on sustainability concerns;
  • Development of mutual interdependency, and conflict analysis techniques between sustainability and other concerns within a software system.

Important Dates:

  • Workshop Paper submission: January 19, 2016 (AoE Time)
  • Review Notification: February 6, 2016
  • Workshop Paper camera-ready deadline: February 13, 2016
  • Workshop date: (TBA – between 14 and 17 of March)

The workshop will result in:

  • Initiating discussions/collaborations between those working on various aspects of software engineering and sustainability;
  • An agenda for this research summarised in the workshop report.

Attendance: All interested attendees are welcome. However, priority will be given to those with submitted papers.

The workshop activities include:

  • Panel-centred paper presentations: where the submitted papers will be presented, and the presenters will then hold a panel discussion with question and answer session with audience participation.
  • Small Group work on Topics of interest (from submissions, keynotes, and paper discussions).
  • Plenary discussion on Research Challenges and Agenda.

Programme Committee:

  • Sedef Akinli Kocak, Ryerson University, Canada
  • Rami Bahsoon, University of Birmingham, UK
  • Christoph Becker, University of Toronto, Canada
  • Stefanie Betz, Karlsruhe Institute for Technology, Germany
  • Christoph Bockisch, Open University of the Netherlands, the Netherlands
  • Leticia Duboc, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  • Steve Easterbrook, , University of Toronto, Canada
  • Maria Angela Ferrario,Lancaster University, UK
  • Jeff Gray, University of Alabama, USA
  • Jörg Kienzle, McGill University, Canada
  • Patricia Lago, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands
  • Grace A. Lewis, Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, USA
  • Somayeh Malakuti, Technical University of Dresden, Germany
  • Gunter Mussbacher, McGill University, Canda
  • Ahmed Seffah, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland
  • Lionel Seinturier, University of Lille, France
  • Norbert Seyff, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, and University of Zurich, Switzerland
  • Colin C. Venters, University of Huddersfield, UK

Organisers:

  • Ruzanna Chitchyan (contact organiser, email to rc256  AT le.ac.uk), University of Leicester, UK
  • Joost Noppen, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
  • Birgit Penzenstadler, California State University Long Beach, USA