• Theme
• Topics
• Submissions
• Participation
• Workshop Organization
• Important Dates
• Organizers
• Useful Links

Theme

Modern software architectural methods advocate the use of multiple views as a central organizing principle of architectural description. By developing separate views, the Architect can clearly isolate and address major architectural concerns, to reduce the perceived complexity of the overall system and improve communication with relevant system stakeholders about those concerns.

Although widespread, the use of views has been largely informal: the rules defining what constitutes a view, its allowable content, and the techniques for constructing, analyzing and presenting that view, are mostly implicit in the current state of the practice.

IEEE Standard 1471, Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems, tries to improve this situation by introducing the notion of architectural viewpoint: "A specification of the conventions for constructing and using a view," i.e., "reusable" resources for creating and analyzing a class of architectural views. Like architectural patterns and styles, viewpoints are a form of architectural knowledge which gives the Architect a "head start" toward addressing recurring architectural concerns.

The aim of this workshop is to focus on making explicit some useful architectural viewpoints, based on the community's knowledge and experience in architectural modeling. The longer-term goal of this workshop is to begin a community process to define commonly-useful architectural viewpoints.

Topics

The workshop seeks position papers on issues related to the definition and application of architectural viewpoints. Topics of interest include:

• As an Architect, what types of architectural concerns do you need to address? Could these be candidates for viewpoints?
• As a system Stakeholder, what forms of information do you need from an architectural description?
• What experience does the community have that may be usefully captured as viewpoints? (For example, there is a large body of work in architectural modeling using the ontology of components and connectors and ways of analyzing such models; is it useful to codify this knowledge as a "Structuralist" viewpoint?)
• What areas are candidates for viewpoints and what resources are currently available for addressing other concerns? (e.g., Behavior, Reliability, Security, ...)?
• Are there important architectural concerns, not well-addressed by current modeling techniques?
• Participants are encouraged to use and/or react to the IEEE 1471 requirements on documenting viewpoints.
• Precursors such as ISO's Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing identify a number of viewpoints. Is it useful to document, or "reengineer" them in the IEEE 1471 "style"?
• What is the impact of explicit definition and use of viewpoints on issues of view integration and traceability?

Workshop Organization

Although the exact organization of the workshop will depend upon the submissions we receive, we hope to:

• begin to document some widely useful viewpoints from practice and by "mining" the literature, applying the IEEE 1471 style of viewpoint documentation;
• identify gaps in current practice where new viewpoints may be needed; and
• discuss appropriate mechanisms for recording, sharing, archiving and retreiving viewpoints.

Submissions

Position papers should less than ten pages and should be prepared in accordance with the WICSA guidelines (http://www.computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm). Submissions should be sent via e-mail to Rich Hilliard (rh@wn.net). PDF or PostScript is preferred. Please include the address and e-mail of the contact author in the e-mail. Accepted papers will be posted on the workshop web site.

Participation

Participation will be by invitation only. All authors of accepted position papers will be invited. Participants must register for WICSA2001.

Important Dates

Deadline for submissions: 21 June 2001

Notification of acceptance: 28 June 2001

Deadline for WICSA'2001 early registration: 30 June 2001

Workshop: 31 August 2001

Organizers

David Emery, The MITRE Corporation

Rich Hilliard, ConsentCache, Inc.

Mark W. Maier, The Aerospace Corporation

Useful Links

Workshop Web Site: http://www.pithecanthropus.com/~awg/wicsa/

Workshop contact: rh@wn.net

IEEE 1471 Page: http://www.pithecanthropus.com/~awg/

(The workshop web site will provide an additional set of links which may be relevant to this topic.)