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< Contents ERCIM News No. 58, July 2004
JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS
 

A New ERCIM Working Group on Rapid Integration of Software Engineering Techniques

by Nicolas Guelfi and RISE's Working Group members

The main goal of the new ERCIM Working Group on Rapid Integration of Software Engineering Techniques (RISE) is to conduct research into new, integrated and practical software engineering approaches. These will be part of a methodological framework and will apply to new and evolving applications, technologies and systems.

The Working Group (WG) defines itself by the following keywords:

Integrated solutions: we envisage the WG developing projects that will promote the integration of software engineering (SE) techniques. The rate of progress in SE research means that many techniques are simultaneously under development and must often be integrated with complementary approaches (for example, research on development process definition and architecture engineering, architectural frameworks and architecture description languages, reuse and software architecture, reuse and test techniques, modelling languages and semantics). We believe that working on the integration of SE techniques will:

  • ease collaborations between ERCIM partners
  • raise targeted/applicative/technological research problems for each of the integrated techniques as well as for the novel integrated solution
  • allow the joint development of new and powerful solutions covering several aspects of the software engineering process.

Practical solutions: we want to focus on concrete applications. Research in software engineering should provide solutions that will support the development process, which means the research problems and the real-life situations in which they exist must be well defined. This does not mean that fundamental research is excluded; rather it means that fundamental problems must be raised and solved in a manner that preserves efficiency and usefulness. Linked with the previous notion of integration, we will undertake research for the mid-term (three to six years). Further fundamental research raised by the WG will be taken up by partners outside the WG.

New solutions: the objective is to identify novel SE techniques, methods and tools before the need for them arises. In other words, due to ICT being such a rapidly evolving sector, we intend RISE to work on solutions to anticipated problems, rather than currently existing ones (we do not want to repeat the so-called software crisis of the 60s).

Methodological guidance: we believe that software engineering solutions should always come with methodological support. RISE will therefore work on the definition of this notion, and any solutions it provides will always be provided with methodological support.

Sub-Domains of Interest
Rather than addressing the entire scope of software engineering, the RISE working group will focus on the following sub-domains:

  • software/system architecture
  • reuse
  • testing
  • model transformation/model-driven engineering
  • requirement engineering
  • lightweight formal methods
  • CASE tools.

Specific Domains of Application and Industry Sectors
The RISE working group will limit its research to specific application domains:

  • Web systems
  • mobility in communication systems
  • high-availability systems
  • embedded systems.

Further, certain specific industry sectors will be given priority:

  • finance and insurance
  • telecommunications
  • avionics and automotive
  • e-Government.

Constraints on Contribution
In order to attract a coherent set of contributions, RISE wishes the following constraints to be applied to proposals:

  • a clear statement of the research problems to be addressed must be provided
  • at least two approaches for integration should be proposed
  • a methodological guideline should be proposed
  • tool support should be provided
  • a validation example should illustrate the proposal.

These constraints should be considered as final objectives for the proposals submitted to the WG. An incremental approach will be followed to organise the research work. While the working group will address problems that only partially adhere to these objectives, we want to stress that such problems should be presented with reference to a globally coherent perspective that respects the constraints of the WG.
The current RISE participants are: Juan Bicarregui (CCLRC), Antonia Bertolino (CNR-ISTI), Paul Klint (CWI), Nicolal Guelfi (FNR), Anthony Savidis (FORTH), Marc Born, Eckhard Moeller, Ina Schieferdecker (Fraunhofer FOKUS), Valérie Issarny (INRIA), Finn Arve Aagesen (NTNU), Joe Armstrong (SICS), Ernesto Pimentel (SpaRCIM), László Monostori (SZTAKI) and Jyrki Haajanen (VTT).

Interested scientists and teams from research and industry who would like to participate in the RISE Working Group should contact the WG coordinator Niclolas Guelfi.

Link:
http://rise.uni.lu

Please contact:
Nicolas Guelfi, RISE WG coordinator
University of Luxembourg
Tel: +352 420 101 251
E-mail : Nicolas.Guelfi@uni.lu
 

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