Proceedings of the 7th international workshop on Software specification and design
Venue: International Workshop on Software Specifications & Design (1993)

A series of workshops, of which this Seventh International Workshop on Software Specification and Design (IWSSD-7) is the latest instance, was begun in 1982. The first five of these workshops were held in conjunction with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Specifically, the first workshop occurred in Kyoto following ICSE-6 (Tokyo, 1982), the second followed ICSE-7 (Orlando, 1984), the third followed ICSE-8 (London, 1985), the fourth followed ICSE-9 (Monterey, 1987) and the fifth followed ICSE-11 (Pittsburgh, 1989). The two most recent occurrences of the workshop have continued both the international character and the connection to major software engineering conferences that marked their predecessors. IWSSD-6, held in Como in 1991, followed the Third European Software Engineering Conference (Milan, 1991). This seventh IWSSD is being held in Redondo Beach, immediately preceding the 1993 SigSoft Symposium entitled "Foundations of Software Engineering." IWSSD-7, like its predecessors, is intended to provide a forum for exploring major trends and key issues in the specification and design of software. The format of the workshop will follow the model that has proven so successful in the previous meetings in this series: A fairly small number (approximately 80) of participants, selected on the basis of submitted papers, will spend most of the two day meeting discussing specific topics in one of five parallel working groups. Three plenary sessions will bring all the workshop participants together, once for an opening address (by Professor Tom Maibaum) and twice for presentation and discussion of the various working groups' deliberations. Of course, the format is only one reason for the success of these workshops. The primary factor in that success is the investment of time, energy, insight, and enthusiasm that has been made by many dedicated individuals over the years. The present meeting, IWSSD-7, has been fortunate to have Martin Feather and Axel van Lamsweerde as its program co-chairs. Martin and Axel took the lead in identifying a set of workshop themes that both reflect and define the directions of current research and practice in software specification and design. They then selected an excellent program committee, orchestrated a careful and thorough review process, and assembled a very strong technical program and set of participants for this meeting. We all owe them a great debt of gratitude for their contributions to IWSSD-7. Similarly, the program committee members deserve our thanks for their efforts in reviewing the submitted papers, selecting the participants and defining the working groups. A particularly important contribution has been made by the chairs of the five working groups, who were responsible for the detailed planning of the activities of then-respective groups. Their efforts, and the active involvement of workshop participants in the various working groups' activities, are the ultimate basis for the success of 1WSSD-7. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the organizing committee of the 1993 SigSoft Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, especially Hal Hart's invaluable role as local arrangements chair of both the SigSoft meeting and IWSSD-7. On behalf of Martin, Axel and the rest of the IWSSD-7 program committee, I hope that you will find this workshop a source of valuable information regarding the current state of research and practice in the field of software specification and design. Perhaps it will inspire you to work toward future advances in this field and to consider participating in the next International Workshop on Software Specification and Design. In the end, your reactions to this meeting will be the truest measure of its success and your interest in future participation will be a significant factor in the ongoing success of the IWSSD series. IWSSD-7 is the seventh in a series of workshops that were informally set up 11 years ago with the goal of exploring major trends and key issues in the specification and design of software systems. This series has gained interest because it has established a unique combination of features useful for the research community mdash; namely, the organization focused on discussions within parallel working groups (rather than formal paper presentations) together with group interaction through plenary sessions, it captured the pre- and post-workshop states through high-quality proceedings and discussion summaries, and it assessed the concepts, models and methods discussed during the workshop through a common set of practical examples that have flourished from one workshop to the next. As in the past, we have tried to avoid the insularity trap by organizing the workshop in conjunction with a major software engineering conference mdash; such as SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering this year mdash; because of significant overlap in themes and approaches. Participation in the workshop continues to be limited to a select number of researchers, chosen on the basis of a submitted paper. Besides technical papers and position statements, the Call for Papers this time solicited a third category, that of experience papers. There has been a continuing emphasis on formal techniques for capturing and analyzing specification/design products and processes. But, as Dana Scott pointed out, "formalization is an experimental science" (D.S. Scott, Background to Formalization In Truth, Syntax and Modality, H. Leblanc, ed., North Holland, 1973, pp. 243-273.) We really need more insight from sizable experiments to guide the elaboration of new formal techniques and the assessment and solidification of existing ones. We received a total of 88 submissions. They continue to reflect a truly international spectrum of work mdash; 22 countries spanning 4 continents are represented. Out of these, the papers published here comprise those judged best by the Program Committee. The selection contains 3 experience papers, 4 position papers, and 16 regular papers. There was a relatively even distribution of submissions across all of the workshop's major themes: bull; Requirements Engineering bull; Real-time Systems bull; Concurrency and Distribution bull; Formal Reasoning bull; Design Methods and Software Architectures These themes obviously are not orthogonal. Some of the papers might have been classified in other categories and some of the experience papers may alternatively be seen as "technical" papers. Each major theme above defines a workshop track for which two coordinators have been nominated. We owe much to the dedicated efforts of these track chairs. They are assigned the difficult task of establishing the principles and rules according to which their group will be working, they have to summarize the group discussions during the plenary sessions, and they are responsible for conveying the essence of the group work in the workshop summaries that will appear subsequently in a professional publication. Besides the track chairs, we would like to express our warmest thanks to all members of the Program Committee who have been working hard reviewing papers and making suggestions regarding the workshop. We are also indebted to all chairs of the previous IWSSD's for establishing the principles on which IWSSD-7 relies. We would finally like to thank all submittors for providing input to these two days of exciting discussions.