APSEC 2009 CO-LOCATED EVENT
PARALLEL SESSIONS OF WORKSHOP & TUTORIAL
30 NOVEMBER 2009

We welcome all APSEC 2009 delegates to join the co-located event on 30 November 2009 at Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia. Besides the 1st Software Engineering Postgraduate Workshop (SEPoW 2009) mainly focus for software engineering postgraduates, the co-located event of APSEC 2009 provides a half day parallel sessions of two workshops and a tutorial as the platform to share knowledge and experience on methods, approaches and tools in software engineering. The upcoming APSEC 2009 workshop will observe the following initiatives.

Workshop 1: Evidence-Based Software Engineering—Setting the Agenda for Empirical Studies

By: Professor David Budgen of Durham University UK and his team.

The evidence based SE is intended to identify and analyze all research-based findings that are relevant to a particular research question in an unbiased and objective manner. However, there are some constraints imposed by the nature of the discipline and the way that repositories are organized, that need to be recognized when undertaking secondary studies. Secondary studies are based on evidence from the literature review or mapping studies that contradict current practices and opinions in the research and practitioner communities. The workshop proposes to examine the practices of evidence-based studies, review with some example outputs that will be useful to all researchers when starting new research projects.

Tutorial 1: Pragmatic Strategies for Variability Management in Product Lines in Small- to Medium-Size Companies

By: Assoc. Prof. Stan Jarzabek of National University of Singapore and his team.

This tutorial will introduce systematic SPL techniques that can help a company sustain business growth. Clarifying and setting up a common architecture for SPL product variants is the first step. Some variant features of products can be nicely mapped into architectural components. Handling such features becomes easy with plug-in components. In most application domains, plug-in component technique is not enough, as the impact of variant features cannot be contained at the component level, but spreads freely across many components, affecting their code at many variation points. Core reusable components become heavily instrumented with variation points, and using multiple techniques to manage variability makes the core components even more complex to work with. You may find this workshop useful in which we will review techniques commonly employed for SPL variability management at architecture and the detailed code level. This part of the workshop will give you a balanced view on how far they can lead you, and complications that typically arise in time. The workshop will blend live demonstrations and hands-on examples of real-life problems based on industrial project experiences, case studies by zooming into technical solutions besides theoretical explanation. Target audience includes software researchers and practitioners with basic understanding of software design and development.

Workshop 2: T-Way Strategies: Systematic Test Data Reduction Techniques for Hardware and Software Testing

By: Dr Kamal Z. Zamli and Mohamad I. Younis from Malaysia

Rigorous software testing is becoming immensely important in our life environment as we are taking risk to apply many software applications particularly critical systems e.g. life support systems, microwave machines and sophisticated airplane control systems. Many combinations of all possible input parameters and system conditions to be tested need to be verified against the user requirements and specifications. This results into a combinatorial explosion problem. A more recent and systematic solution to this problem is based on t-way testing strategy, where t denotes the interaction strength. Combinatorial explosion problem is NP-complete, it is often unlikely that efficient strategy exists that can always generate optimal test set i.e. each interaction pair is covered by only one test. This workshop will also provide hands-on and a t-way tool demonstration developed by the team. It target audience includes researchers and practitioners interested in combinatorial software testing and software/hardware test engineers.

Note:
All registered APSEC 2009 participants who also register to join the co-located workshop for an additional fee RM150, may join both SEPoW 2009 and any of the two workshops and the tutorial.