9th Monterey Workshop: Radical Innovations of Software and Systems Engineering in the Future (2002)

During the last decade object-orientation was the driving factor for new system solutions in many areas ranging from e-commerce to embedded systems. New modeling languages such as UML, new programming languages such as Java and CASE tools have considerably influenced the system development techniques of today and will remain key techniques for the near future. However, actual practice shows many deficiencies of these new approaches:

• There is no proof and no evidence that software productivity has increased with the new methods;
• UML has no clean scientific foundations which inhibit the construction of powerful analysis and development tools;
• support for mobile distributed system development is missing;
• for many applications, object-oriented design is not suited to produce clean well-structured code as many applications show.

As a consequence there is an urgent need for new "post object-oriented" software engineering and programming techniques.

This workshop would be the 9th in a series of Software Engineering workshops for formulating and advancing software engineering models and techniques, with the fundamental theme of increasing the practical impact of formal methods. Previous workshops have been devoted to "Real-time & Concurrent Systems", "Software Merging and Slicing", "Software Evolution", "Software Architecture", "Requirements Targeting Software", "Engineering Automation for Computer Based Systems", "Modeling Software System Structures in a Fastly Moving Scenario" and "Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration".

A major goal for this series of workshops is to help focus the software engineering community on issues that are vital to improving the state of software engineering practice, bringing together American and European leading scientists actively engaged in the area. The following quotations from the PITAC (President's Information Technology Advisory Committee) 1998 Interim Report to the President of USA help set the context for the workshop initiative.

"The demand for software has grown far faster than the resources we have to produce it. The result is that desperately needed software is not being developed. Furthermore, the nation needs software that is far more usable, reliable, and powerful than what is being produced today."

 

"... it has become clear that the processes of developing, testing, and maintaining software must change. We need scientifically sound approaches to software development that will enable meaningful and practical testing for consistency of specifications and implementations."

Unfortunately, as the same interim report emphasizes, "current support (for research) is taking a short-term focus, looking for immediate returns, rather than investigating high-risk long-term technologies".

As a consequence, there is a danger of even widening the gap between fundamental research and current (not always best) practice. Indeed, together with long standing problems, such as the quest for software reliability, we are facing the need and partly the emergence of radically different ways of producing software.

The aims of the Workshop, continuing the effort to bring together pragmatic and foundational research in software engineering, are threefold:

• to discuss the actual problems and short-comings in Software and Systems Engineering, to evaluate potential or partial solutions that have been proposed, and to analyze why some ideas were or were not successful;
• to propose and discuss in a pro-active way radically new innovations in Software and Systems Engineering and to present visionary and explorative perspectives and bold ideas for the modeling language, the programming language, the system development method and the system development process of tomorrow;
• to show how the wealth of past foundational research in Software Engineering can be uplifted to handle the new problems posed, among others, by the different level of component and system granularity, the heterogeneity of components, the use of distribution and communication and the request for appropriate human-interface support.

The workshop will encourage joint work leading to joint publications by researchers from different institutions by including a session focused on identifying opportunities for future collaboration and integration of complementary advances.

Download the Proceedings here.

Topics to be Addressed

The workshop provides a bridge between industry and academia. The program will provide a balanced view of academic research and industrial visions, developments and proposals. Contributions are sought in but not limited to the following areas:

• Analysis of actual problems in Systems and Software Engineering and their existing solutions
• New Paradigms for System Development Methods and Processes
• New Paradigms for Modeling and Specification Languages
• Post-Object-Oriented Programming Concepts
• Scientific and technological foundations of System Development
• Innovative Tool Support for System Development

Scientific development has a large amount of inertia and it takes effort sustained for a long time to produce changes in direction. Over the years, the Monterey Workshop has succeeded in changing the attitude of the top researchers in the field towards practical relevance, and has initiated technology transfer by encouraging researchers to apply revolutionary ideas and methods developed at other research centers. The workshop has created stronger cooperation between U.S. and European researchers and fostered cooperation and collaboration among researchers with disparate points of view. Collaboration between researchers from different backgrounds requires a long time for people from different schools of thought to understand each other's work and to find common ground for integration and fruitful collaboration. Some examples new collaborations between Prof. Manna's group at Stanford and Prof. Broy's group at Technical University of Munich, as well as between Prof. Auguston at New Mexico State University and Prof. Luqi's Software Engineering Group at NPS.

Steering Committee

Egidio Astesiano, University of Genova, Italy
Manfred Broy, Technical University of Munich, Germany
David Hislop, US Army Research Office, USA
Luqi, US Naval Postgraduate School, USA
Zohar Manna, Stanford University, USA

Programme Committee

Martin Wirsing (Chair), University of Munich, Germany
Mikhail Auguston, New Mexico State University, USA
Simonetta Balsamo, Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Italy
Dan Berry, University of Waterloo, Canada
Valdis Berzins, US Naval Postgraduate School, USA
Swapan Bhattacharya, Jadavpur University, India
Barrett Bryant, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Rance Cleveland, SUNY at Stony Brook, USA
Peter Freeman, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Marie-Claude Gaudel, University of Paris-Orsay, France
Carlo Ghezzi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Purush Iyer, North Carolina State University, USA
Oscar Nierstrasz, Bern University, Switzerland
Axel van Lamsweerde, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Jeanette Wing, Carnegie Mellon University, USA