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Back from ICSE

Written by andReas, 30.07.2008

This post comes a little late, sorry about that, I have been rather busy lately.

Last May I went to the International Conference on Software Engineering in Leipzig, Germany. I presented a paper at the Problem Frames workshop (IWAAPF) about our approach of formalising problem diagrams with the Event Calculus and how FIFramework (albeit in a somewhat degenerated form) can be used to prove the frame concern automatically.

The workshop was very interesting and the remainder of the conference was the occasion to catch up with research as well as to meet interesting people and colleagues whom I had not seen in a year. In all, ICSE was a very rewarding experience, I hope I make it to Vancouver next year.

Obviously, I also used the occasion to visit the city of Leipzig and brought back some pictures. Unfortunately, the city centre is is full of construction sites. They are building a railway tunnel below the city, causing sporadic construction sites, as well as kilometres of big blue pipes running through the city (which they need to pump ground water out of the underground site). Nevertheless, the city centre is worth a visit, especially the two churches (Nikolai and Thomas), the market place and the "new" town hall. I also walked down to the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, a monument constructed at the end of the 19th century. On my way there I crossed the former trade fair ground with the iconic soviet pavilion now standing in the midst of department stores and car dealerships, how ironic. Unfortunately I did not have the time to scout the whole place for nice locations and walked on rather quickly. On the opposite side of the town lies the Waldstraßenviertel, a whole district of Gründerzeit architecture, definitely a must-see.

I added four new pictures to the header rotation: 34 - a statue of the fountain in front of the Gewandhaus, 35 - the small dome at the entrance of Nikolaikirche, 36 - the Bach monument in front of the Thomaskirche and 37 - a view past the arcade of the chapel at the Südfriedhof.

New pictures

Written by andReas, 24.04.2008

As promised, I put a selection of photographs I took during my visit to Budapest (at ETAPS) into the header image rotation. The new ones are: 21 - the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, 22 - the Széchenyi Medicinal Bath, 23 - the Hungarian Parliament Building, 24 - lamps of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, 25 - the Hungarian Parliament Building at night, 26 - a statue on the Jáki kápolna (in the court of Vajdahunyad Castle), 27 - a look up the front of Szt. István Bazilika, 28 - pigeons on a power line in front of a rundown building on Deák Ferenc Square, and 29 - Hősök tere (Heroes' Square) station of metro line 1, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

But that's not all. I also went on a week-end trip to the former german capital city of Bonn, where I took some pictures as well: 30 - calculation machines in the Arithmeum (housing the world's largest collection of historical mechanical calculating machines), 31 - a view down Poppelsdorfer Allee with the Poppelsdorfer Schloss in the background, 32 - a small statue looking over the Rhine, 33 - someone tightrope walking in the park.

Back from ETAPS'08 in Budapest

Written by andReas, 08.04.2008

Just back from ETAPS'08 which was held in Budapest, Hungary last week. On Monday I presented my paper What's in a Feature: A Requirements Engineering Perspective at FASE and divided the remainder of the week between FASE, TACAS and FOSSACS sessions. In all it was a great experience, I met a number of very interesting researchers and had a great time discussing with them. In conclusion, ETAPS is an event you shouldn't miss.

ETAPS was held in Budapest, the beautiful capital city of Hungary. As I arrived early, I could spend two days and a half visiting the numerous sights of the city. The weather was very good, bright sunshine and no clouds and so I managed to take close to 900 pictures I'm still sifting through them, when I'm done I'll add some of them to the page header.

Update of FIFramework

Written by andReas, 31.01.2008

FIFramework is the Event Calculus front-end for Eclipse that I originally developed for my MSc thesis (it was also referenced in a paper recently accepted at FASE'08). Since last summer it didn't evolve much, and when I tried it on my new MacBook, it turned out that there were some OS-related issues. So I spend this week doing some bugfixes, testing it, making it work under mac and writing some additional installation notes. After realising how tedious the Decreasoner (that's the back-end reasoning tool) installation actually is, I also included a pre-compiled version for Win32 and MacOSX Intel platforms. Now, people that want to try the tool don't need to spend hours with their shell compiling SAT solvers and getting headaches.

The main goal of the tool is to provide a push-button interface for the execution of proofs of the form "S, W |- R" (the specification S combined with the domain assumptions W entails the requirement R). It comes with an editor that has syntax highlighting and code completion, as well as a number of new toolbar buttons and settings. The event calculus syntax used in the tool is the one of Decreasoner, extended by a construct to distinguish which formulae belong to S, W and R. In addition it can be used for feature interaction detection as described in the thesis and in the upcoming FASE paper.

The easiest way to get familiar with the tool is to look at the LightUnits example that comes with it. In addition, there is a chapter in the thesis that talks about it.

You can get it here .

Back from VaMoS'08 in Essen, paper at FASE'08

Written by andReas, 21.01.2008

Last week I participated in the Second International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-intensive Systems (VaMoS) in Essen, Germany. It was a very nice event with lots of interesting discussions on the topic of variability modelling in general, as well as meta-variability, runtime-variability and definition issues in particular.

Concerning the latter, I will present a paper at the upcoming FASE'08 conference with the title: What's in a Feature: A Requirements Engineering Perspective, where we look at the existing definitions of "Feature", and try to give a general definition in the light of the Zave & Jackson requirements engineering framework. The abstract reads as follows:

The notion of feature is heavily used in Software Engineering, especially for software product lines. However, this notion appears to be confusing, mixing various aspects of problem and solution. In this paper, we attempt to clarify the notion of feature in the light of Zave and Jackson's framework for Requirements Engineering. By redefining a problem-level feature as a set of related requirements, specifications and domain assumptions---the three types of statements central to Zave and Jackson's framework---we also revisit the notion of feature interaction. This clarification work opens new perspectives on formal description and verification of software product lines. An important benefit of the approach is to enable an early identification of feature interactions taking place in the systems' environment, a notoriously challenging problem. The approach is illustrated through a proof-of-concept prototype tool and applied to a Smart Home example.

International "Secure by Design" Workshop

Written by andReas, 03.12.2007

Together with other researches from the University of Namur, I attended a small but efficient workshop on security in the requirements and early design phases, "Secure by Design" in at the University of East London. The workshop was a nice occasion to discuss ideas and ongoing work with a very interested and involved audience. Unfortunately we didn't get to see much of the Docklands in east London, as we spent most time at the workshop. Anyway, we had a good time and I got quite some feedback on my work.

Website updated

Written by andReas, 18.10.2007

I just updated the page. The CV and several other sections were revised and two projects were added to the list of references. I also created a page with resources on my MSc thesis, where you can download FIFramework, an Eclipse plugin for automated formal verification of software product lines specified using the event calculus.

ICFI'07

Written by andReas, 04.09.2007

I'm writing this post while I am attending the Ninth International Conference on Feature Interactions in Software and Communication Systems (ICFI) which is held in the fair town of Grenoble, France. I presented the results of my MSc thesis at the doctoral symposium. The abstract of my short paper Problem-Oriented Feature Interaction Detection reads as follows.

Feature interaction detection in the context of systems that are highly integrated into their environment, such as embedded or software-intensive systems, is different from classical feature interaction detection. The physical environment may be ?the source of additional interactions? as interactions may be caused by, and occur in, the system?s physical environment.
We thus propose an approach for automated detection of feature interactions in the environment which is based on feature diagrams capturing variability, problem diagrams describing the system in its context and event calculus formulae allowing for automated reasoning. Feasibility of the approach is demonstrated through a proof-of-concept tool implementation and an in-depth illustration.

You can download the paper here.

Some new photographs

Written by andReas, 24.07.2007

I just added several new images to the collection of photographs displayed randomly in the page header. An old one from January showing St. Mary's Cathedral in Limerick, and several newer ones I took during my stay in Portugal (while at GTTSE'07): the Bom Jesù chruch, a portal of the Archbishop's Palace in Braga, and several sights of Porto.

GTTSE'07

Written by andReas, 10.07.2007

What a week! I just got back from Braga, Portugal, where I attended the 2nd International Summer School on Generative and Transformational Techniques in Software Engineering (GTTSE) together with around 100 other people from all around the world. It was the first summer school I attended and altogether a very nice experience. I met many very kind people, got to see among others the cities of Porto and Braga as well as the Bom Jesù church; and attended 8 interesting tutorials, and several other presentations.

The next instalment of GTTSE will probably be held in 2009. It is reasonable to recommend it to anyone interested in the above research topics.

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