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PLoP 2006 Shepherded Papers

Notes on Paper 39:

below is Neil's recommendation.

Unfortunately, I do not have the final version of the paper. I had a
hard disk crash on 13 July, and lost mosft of my recent e-mails (I
think I already told Joe about it). Simon sent his paper on 10 July.
I am very sorry.

I agreed with Neil's conclusion to reject the paper, for a similar
reason as Neil - I was also missing sufficient information in the
paper why this taxonomy is useful.

Thanks,
Pavel


________________________________

From: Neil HARRISON [mailto:HARRISNE@uvsc.edu]
Sent: Tue 8/1/2006 18:18
To: Pavel Hruby
Subject: PLoP Paper Recommendation



Pavel,

It appears that I send my shepherd's recommendation to you.

Here is my recommendation for Simon Giesecke's paper about a Taxonomy
of Architectural style Usages.

I'm not very thrilled by it; I don't think I would recommend to accept
it.

Here's why:

The paper introduces a taxonomy of uses of architectural styles, aka
patterns. If you write a taxonomy, the burden is on you to show the
following:

* Consistency (the categories should not conflict)
* Closure (the categories should be complete enough that all
elements fit appropriately.)
* Utility (Why is this taxonomy meaningful; what use it it?)

I have a little problem with consistency, in that the categories
sometimes appear
to be along different axes, but I'll let that slide. That said, the
authors don't
address this point directly.

The authors also don't address the question of closure, but I didn't
see any problems
there.

The authors also don't address utility. This is a killer. They don't
justify the
existence of their taxonomy. They may try in section 9, but if so, they do it
by introducing yet another taxonomy. And this one is less grounded
than the first.

So the authors need to convince us that the taxonomies are useful. They
don't do it.

I poiinted this out early in shepherding, but they seemed to ignore
that issue;
they never addressed it at all. In fact, they made very few changes to the
paper in response to shepherding; the changes were very minor.

Thanks,

Neil