Proceedings of the 6th international workshop on Software specification and design
Venue: International Workshop on Software Specifications & Design (1991)

The preceding workshops of this series accompanied occurrences of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). More precisely, the first workshop was held in Kyoto after ICSE-6 (Tokyo, 1982), and the second one came with ICSE-7 (Orlando, 1984). IWSSD-3, IWSSD-4, and IWSSDJ followed respectively ICSE-8 in London (1985), ICSE-9 in Monterey (1987) and ICSE-11 in Pittsburgh (1989). In 1988 a Steering Committee (chaired by Robert Babb) was formed to plan the fate of future IWSSD workshops. More precisely, this Committee is entrusted with the task of organizing the series and preserving the spirit of the meetings, as well as their technical quality. In particular, the Steering Committee chooses the time, the place and the chairpersons of the next workshop. A strong association with ICSE has had various advantages, but its recently adopted annual Jean-Pierre Finance schedule was considered too frequent for the IWSSD series. The Steering Committee decided to maintain a two-year periodicity, and consequently to associate the IWSSD workshops with several major conferences. Thus for the first time, this workshop follows the European Software Engineering Conference ESEC). It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you today in this marvellous site of the Centro di Cultura Scientifica "A. Volta" in Como. The purpose of this workshop, as its predecessors, is to explore major trends and key issues in the specification and design of software systems. However, the spirit and the form differ from those of larger conferences on this topic by providing intensive discussion in which formalists, methodologists, developers and practitioners from both academia and industry can interact in an informal, yet focused setting. Attendance is limited and is by invitation on the basis of a submitted paper. The selection process has two goals: to assess the authors' areas of interest and to print those which are judged to be of most interest in the workshop proceedings. The 80 or so attendees will spend most of their time in one of the small parallel working groups. The rest of the time will be spent in plenary sessions. Welcome to the Sixth International Workshop on Software Specification and Design, held in Como on 25-26 October, 1991. As in the past, there has been a deliberate attempt to place the issues of specification and design within the general context of software engineering by maintaining a complementary link to a major software engineering conference. In 1991, this broader context is provided by the Third European Software Engineering Conference, held in Milan, October 21-24, 1991. Participation in the workshop continues to be limited to a select number of researchers, chosen on the basis of a submitted paper or position statement The total number of submissions this year was 111. Out of these, we decided to include in the workshop's Proceedings 22 regular papers and 10 position papers which were judged to meet the high technical standards adopted by the 6IWSSD Program Committee. The Proceedings, however, contain only background material, most of which will be discussed during the workshop. The workshop, in fact, is not organized around formal paper presentations, but rather around focused discussions within working groups. This requires participants to take an active role in raising problems, discussing possible solutions, identifying open issues, evaluating competing approaches, etc. On the basis of accepted submissions, the following sessions and associated working groups have been identified by the Program Committee: - Requirements - Concurrency and distribution - Real-time systems - Formal methods - Design methods and process models For each of these, two session coordinators have been nominated. In preparation for the workshop, they established a common set of ground rules designed to make discussions within each session highly productive. Judging from the quality of these Proceedings, we believe the IWSSD increasingly attracts top-level researchers who desire to present their results to this forum. The papers published here report on timely and novel results that can become the starting point for many stimulating discussions. Some clear trends in research in software specification and design are also evident in these pages: the growing interest in formal methods and their application to new and challenging aspects of concurrent and distributed systems, real-time systems, software development processes, and structurally complex problems in general. Another related issue is the interplay between formal and informal reasoning. In closing, we would like to thank all those who contributed to shaping the final program of the workshop: the members of the Program Committee, for their careful reviews and their suggestions; the session coordinators, for their efforts in organizing the individual sessions; and the authors of submitted papers, for their intellectual contributions which helped us assemble a high-quality program.