Report on IWPSE-EVOL 2010 – International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution

by Anthony Cleve and Tom Mens

The sixth annual workshop of the ERCIM Working Group of Software Evolution took place in Antwerp, Belgium, 20-21 September 2010, under the auspices of the ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution. The event gathered theorists and practitioners to present and discuss the state-of-the-art in research and practice on automated software evolution.

For the second year in a row, the ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution jointly organized its annual workshop on software evolution (EVOL) together with the International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (IWPSE). This year’s edition focused on Automated Software Evolution, in order to remain in sync with the international conference with which IWPSE-EVOL 2010 was co-located, namely ASE 2010, the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated Software Engineering that celebrated its 25th anniversary edition. The workshop was co-organized by Anthony Cleve (ERCIM Postdoctoral Fellow at INRIA Lille, France), Naouel Moha (INRIA Rennes, France) and Andrea Capiluppi (University of East London, UK).

IWPSE-EVOL was the most successful workshop of ASE 2010 with 28 participants originating from 12 different countries across all continents. The workshop attracted 31 submissions. To maintain the high quality standards of our workshop, only 13 of these submissions were accepted for presentation and publication, after a rigorous peer review by at least three different members from the programme committee. All accepted papers have been published in the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series (AICPS). The full list of papers and authors can be seen on the workshop’s website. In addition, a special issue of Elsevier’s Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) dedicated to automated software evolution will be associated to IWPSE-EVOL 2010. Paper submission deadline is 30 November 2010.

A best paper award (see photo) was presented to Lile Hattori, Mircea Lungu and Michele Lanza, for their paper “Replaying past changes in multi-developer projects”. This paper presents Replay, an interactive tool allowing software developers to replay past software changes at a fine-grained level.

Anthony Cleve (left), ERCIM fellow and workshop co-organiser, and Lile Hattori, first author of the award-winning paper.
Anthony Cleve (left), ERCIM fellow and workshop co-organiser, and Lile Hattori, first author of the award-winning paper.

The workshop also welcomed two invited keynote talks. The first one, by Andrian Marcus (Wayne State University, USA) was entitled “Software is Data Too: How should we deal with it?” In this talk, Andrian Marcus discussed the numerous challenges related to the analysis and management of software data. He argued for new empirical research approaches and for stronger collaboration among researchers and practitioners. The second invited talk, by Massimiliano Di Penta (University of Sannio, Italy), was entitled “Empirical Studies on Software Evolution: Should we (try to) claim Causation?”. Massimiliano Di Penta presented his vision of empirical studies on software evolution. He elaborated on the need to integrate new sources of information, to combine several analysis techniques and, last but not least, to carefully interpret the results obtained.

Links:
Workshop Proceedings: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1862372
Workshop website: http://soft.vub.ac.be/iwpse-evol/
Working Group website: http://wiki.ercim.eu/wg/SoftwareEvolution

Please contact:
Tom Mens,
ERCIM Software Evolution Working Group chair
Université de Mons, Belgium
Tel: +32 65 37 3453
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.