4th International Workshop on Exception Handling (WEH.08)

14 November 2008

Call for Papers

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4th International Workshop on Exception Handling (WEH.08)
Atlanta, GA, 14 November 2008, USA
Co-located with 16th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 16)

Motivation

A number of recent field studies have identified that error handling design in industrial applications typically exhibits poor quality
independently of the underlying programming language and application domain. As a consequence, it does not seem pragmatic to think
that the core problems of exception handling reside exclusively on the design of contemporary programming languages. Also, many
researchers have recently found out that exceptions are a global design issue. As such, they should be systematically treated
across the software lifecycle.

Not surprisingly, the interest in exception handling has been consistently growing in the software engineering community through
the last years. The relevance of the topic becomes even more evident when we look at the number of recent work on exception handling in
key software engineering areas, such as contemporary modularisation techniques (e.g. aspect-oriented programming and feature-oriented
programming), model-driven engineering, software evolution, refactoring, empirical studies, software product lines, ubiquitous computing, and formal methods. They are consistently appearing in the software engineering literature and scattered across relevant journal publications and the technical programs of top software engineering conferences.

Goals


This workshop will provide a forum for presenting and discussing research on exception handling in all areas of software development.
The participants will work together to identify exception handling challenges in the whole software life cycle, methodological as well
as technical issues, modelling techniques and linguistic mechanisms. In particular, we will be interested in discussing open research
questions in the following contexts:

  • exception handling during early development phases, such as requirements elicitation, specification and analysis;
  • formal modelling, testing, validation and verification of exception handling;
  • model transformations and refinements in the presence of exceptions;
  • best practice in exception handling engineering;
  • exception handling in open, dynamic and ubiquitous systems.

Based on the workshop submissions, the workshop aims to (i) debate the open issues on the interplay of exception handling and software engineering; (ii) bring the attention of the software engineering community to the importance of exception handling in contemporary software development; (iii) motivate the expansion of systematic practice and research of exception handling throughout the whole software lifecycle, and (iv) foster a collaborative environment for both practitioners and researchers interested in of innovative exception handling techniques.

Topics of Interest

The workshop is intended to cover a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to):

  • Exceptions in software processes
  • Empirical studies of exception handling engineering
  • Exception documentation
  • Exception handling and requirements engineering
  • Exception handling and architectural design
  • Design patterns and anti-patterns, architectural styles, and good programming practice cookbooks
  • Static analysis and testing of exception handling
  • Refactoring and evolution of exception handling code
  • Exceptions and variability management
  • Exception handling in formal system development
  • Comparative studies of innovative exception handling techniques and conventional ones
  • Exception handling and contemporary modularization techniques (e.g. aspect-oriented programming)
  • Exception handling and variability mechanisms
  • Metrics and quality models for abnormal behaviour
  • Exception handling and middleware design
  • MDD for exceptions
  • Exception handling in multi-agent systems
  • Exception handling in service-oriented architectures
  • Development of predictive models of defect rates
  • Checked versus unchecked exceptions

Workshop Format and Submissions

WEH.08 is a one-day workshop with a strong focus on discussions. Authors who plan to contribute with a paper are requested to submit a
position paper through the workshop website. The submission must follow the FSE style guidelines. Papers must be submitted electronically at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=weh08 in PDF format.

We are soliciting the submission of two categories of position papers:

  1. traditional position papers (5-8 pages) related to workshop topics;
  2. very short position papers (1-2 pages), where the authors describe their thoughts, lessons learned, or points of view with respect to one or more workshop topics;

Papers will be refereed by at least three reviewers. Moreover we especially encourage authors to present their experience and/or novel
ideas on how to provide a modern software engineering treatment of exception handling (shorter format). The papers chosen
for presentation should offer different or novel perspectives on the workshop topics and they must have a high potential for generating
issues that will stimulate the discussions.

Special Issue at IEEE TSE (Transactions on Software Engineering)

An extra attraction for submitting and attending the WEH workshop is that we will invite the authors of the best WEH papers to submit significant extensions of their papers to a journal special issue on exception handling. The special issue will be published in one
of the future issues of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE). The selected workshop papers are expected to report well-validated research on exception handling. Even though an invitation does not imply the journal paper acceptance, the authors will receive guidance on how they could improve their work towards the journal paper submission.

Important Dates

Paper Submission: August 15, 2008
Notification:September 4, 2008
Camera-ready Paper: September 20, 2008
Workshop Day: November 14, 2008

Program Committee (to be confirmed)

 

  • William Bail, Mitre, USA
  • Dan Berry, University of Waterloo, Canada
    http://se.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/
  • Peter Allan Buhr - University of Waterloo, Canada
    http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~pabuhr/
  • Nelio Cacho, Lancaster University, UK
    http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/cacho/
  • Fernando Filho, State Univ. of Pernambuco, Brazil
    http://fernando.castor.dsc.upe.br/Site/Welcome.html
  • Phil Koopman, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
    http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/
  • Axel van Lamsweerde, Univ. Cat. Louvain, Belgium
    http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/Bienvenue/Academiques/VanLamsweerde/
  • Wolfgang de Meuter - Vrije University Brussels
    http://prog.vub.ac.be/doku.php?id=wolfwiki
  • Cecilia Rubira, University of Campinas, Brazil
    http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~cmrubira/
  • Richard D. Schlichting, AT&T, USA
    http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~rick/
  • Francois Taiani, Lancaster University, UK
    http://ftaiani.ouvaton.org/
  • Anand Tripathi, University of Minneapolis, USA
    http://www.cs.umn.edu/people/faculty/?id=167
  • Elena Troubitsyna, Aabo Akademi, Finland
    http://web.abo.fi/~Elena.Troubitsyna/

 

Workshop Co-Chairs

Alessandro Garcia, Lancaster University, UK
Alexander Romanovsky, University of Newcastle, UK
Jörg Kienzle, Mcgill University, Canada
Christophe Dony, Montpellier-II University, France

Organizing Committee

  • Alessandro Garcia, Lancaster University, UK - garciaa@comp.lancs.ac.uk
  • Alexander Romanovsky, University of Newcastle, UK - alexander.romanovsky@ncl.ac.uk
  • Jörg Kienzle, Mcgill University, Canada - Joerg.Kienzle@mcgill.ca
  • Christophe Dony, Montpellier-II University, France
  • Nelio Cacho, Lancaster University, UK - n.cacho@lancaster.ac.uk