WICSA 2004 Workshop Call for Participation

A Wiki WAN Party: Capturing Experience in Software Architecture Best Practices

June 12-15, 2004

Oslo, Norway

Held in conjunction with the 4^th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA 2004)

http://wicsa4.cs.rug.nl/

Workshop Theme and Goals

WICSA is a working conference and working sessions have long been a tradition at previous conferences. They have been used to collect examples of existing best practices; identify characteristics of existing methods and techniques; identify gaps in the state of the practice; and propose new techniques to fill those gaps. This year we add a new twist to this idea by using wiki software as a group communication mechanism that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) is our model and platform for on-line collaboration. The goal is to encourage ideas about software architecture to evolve as an ongoing discussion among members of the software architecture/WICSA community in the form of entries on wikipedia.

Topics of interest will include (but not be limited to) themes from the WICSA technical program:

• Architecture Analysis
• Architecture Evolution
• Architecture in practice
• Architecture Methods
• Architecture Tools
• Architecture Styles
• Architecture of Large systems

Martin Wattenberg, IBM Watson Research Center, will assist us in visualizing the collaborative process through use of his History Flow application (http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/). The history flow application charts the evolution of a document as it is edited by many people using a very simple visualization technique. We will use the application to evaluate how the collaboration is progressing. We will post intermediate results during the conference and report on final results during the plenary session of the conference.

Agenda

The “workshop” will occur in four segments.

1. Saturday morning, June 12, 9:00 - 12:30. Workshop Session.

· Introductions from the participants. Discussion on the goals of workshop.

· Wiki tutorial

· Walkthrough of wiki – adding an entry, monitoring changes, making changes

2. Virtual Workshop throughout the conference as people contribute new material and revise existing material on the wiki server.

3. Tuesday afternoon, June 15, 13:30-15:00. Working session. Workshop wrap-up to reflect on the wiki experience.

4. Tuesday afternoon, June 15, 15:30-16:30. Workshop summary. Plenary session at end of the WICSA conference to report on the wiki experience to the WICSA conference attendees.

Expected audience

This workshop is intended for anyone interested in distilling software architecture best practices (software architects, software lead designers, students, researchers, managers, educators, etc).

Participants are asked to prepare for the workshop by submitting the following to the workshop chairs (jas@cs.tufts.edu):

(1) Short bio or statement on background.

(2) A position or observation on the state of the practice in software architecture in the form of a wiki excerpt that will be the raw material for an online wiki submission.

The workshop is open to all conference participants and submission materials will not be used for choosing participants. The workshop organizers will use the submission materials to gauge interest in the themes and to help organize the initial wiki online material and plan for the workshop.

Important Dates

Submission Due June 2, 2004

Workshop June 12-15, 2004

Workshop Chairs (alphabetical order)

Shang-Wen Cheng Dept. of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University zensoul@cs.cmu.edu

Robert L. Nord Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon University rn@sei.cmu.edu

Judith Stafford Dept. of Computer Science Tufts University jas@cs.tufts.edu