July 8-12, 2009, Irsee Monastery, Bavaria, Germany
There are three scheduled focus groups at EuroPLoP this year, which will take place on Fri. This year we are also trying something different: the focus groups on Sat will be in an open space format. That is, you propose a focus group, and people sign on the spot.
Focus group leaders: Paris Avgeriou, Uwe Zdun, Neil Harrison, and Uwe van Heesch
Architecture documentation often consists of descriptions, design models and other artifacts that record the outcome of the design process, but misses the context and the rationale behind the specific solutions chosen. Comprehensive documentation is considered a resource-intensive task, that does not have an immediate benefit for documenters. By skipping it however, some important aspects of the architect's decisions such as the decision context, assumptions, decision drivers, consequences and considered alternatives get lost, or at least become hard to recover.
In this focus group we will provide the architecture documentation of an existing system and ask the participants to recover the architectural decisions and related knowledge (requirements they address, rationale behind the decisions, dependencies etc.). Therefore the participants will attempt to understand what the architects decided and why, just by looking at the architecture documentation. The results of the recovered architectural knowledge will be then compared to the original intent of the architects.
Focus group leaders: Markus Voelter, Christa Schwanninger, Michael Kircher, and Dietmar Schuetz
While the field of software development is maturing, cost pressure is leading the industry into more intensified reuse. As we know OO and component orientation did not bring the expected reuse, new approaches were established. So, Software Product Line Engineering has become an important way of building software. In SPLE, the focus is shifted from building isolated products to building families of related products, while reuse is discussed not at a individual object level but as a whole: organizational, process-wise, and also from requirements to actually deployed variability at the customer. While a lot of literature on SPLE exists, there is no collection of well distilled, easy to use and practical patterns. The goal of this focus group is to start the process of collecting and structuring patterns in this area.
Focus group leaders: Klaus Marquardt
Sound bites, maxims, sayings, etc. are often used in software development. Some appear to be helpful and thought provoking -- e.g., "program to an interface, not an implementation" -- whereas others sound good, but scratch the surface and there's either not much there or the conclusions are unhelpful and contradictory -- e.g., "exceptions should be exceptional".