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The software industry is moving towards a software factory business model, usually involving several centres collaborating on company contracts. The expected benefits of using specialized teams at lower cost locations are increased productivity and reduced costs. The tasks of project and process management have as a consequence become more complex. Managing such large structures requires more collaboration in development processes to enable rapid reaction to project needs, and support for the variety of technologies, methods, and levels of quality required by the different projects. This situation demands new practices and management support tools. This paper presents Zentipede, a tool for software process management. Its focus is on lightening, or even automating, management tasks by using Business Process Management (BPM) techniques. The tool does not force any particular practice on a company, but encourages it to model the practices which will finally be automated. Also, it supports process-to-product traceability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architecture definition requires architects who are highly qualified in both the use of architectural patterns and the analysis of the application΄s requirements. This is because they have to identify what patterns satisfy the application΄s functional requirements (FR) and quality attributes (QA), and the interrelationships between them. However, since QAs and FRs are usually addressed separately, their interrelationships are not detailed in full. This situation means that the architect has to expend considerable effort on their identification, with the risk of misinterpretations that lead to an inappropriate choice of patterns. We here present a model that allows the FRs to be marked with the constraints imposed by the QAs. The marks are conceived to be re-used during the architecture definition. The model brings knowledge of the requirements and their relationships closer to the architect, allowing patterns aligned with the requirements to be identified with less effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coordination and Adaptation are two key issues when developing complex distributed systems. Coordination focuses on the interaction among software entities. Adaptation focuses on solving the problems that arise when the interacting entities do not match properly. This is the report of the fourth edition of the WCAT workshop, that took place in Berlin jointly with ECOOP 2007. Previous editions the workshop dealt with general issues which mainly served for a better characterization of Software Adaptation as an emerging discipline within the field of Software Engineering. For this edition, we wanted to put the focus on practical approaches for software adaptation, in order to show how this discipline helps in the construction of current software systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When increasing the complexity of software systems new techniques allowing for their adequate manipulation are required. In the last ten years, AOSD has been proposed to manage the systems complexity by considering concepts of AO programming extended along the software life cycle. The suitability of the existence of an AO architectural design appears when AO concepts are extended to the whole life cycle. In order to adequately specify the AO design, Aspect-Oriented ADLs are needed. In this paper AspectLEDA, an ADL to support architectural descriptions treating aspects, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of adaptive user interfaces has traditionally been restricted to research prototypes and few commercial products. Although there have been relevant achievements in the architectural support for self-adaptive context-aware systems [3,19], the notion of context commonly supported is restricted and does not explicitly contemplate the facets of context related to user-application interaction. Furthermore, applications need to comply with the proposed architectures, making the incorporation of adaptivity more difficult (or not possible at all) in the case of already existing applications. This work addresses key issues for the incorporation of self-adaptive behaviour in GUI-Based applications, and proposes an aspect-based framework in order to overcome current limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of reusing existing software has always been a major concern of Software Engineering. The reuse and integration of heterogeneous software parts is an issue for current paradigms such as Component-Based Software Development, or Coordination Models and Languages. However, a serious limitation of current approaches is that while they provide convenient ways to describe the typed signatures of software entities, they offer a quite limited support to describe their concurrent behaviour. As a consequence, when a component is going to be reused, one can only be sure that it provides the required interface, but nothing else can be inferred about the behaviour of the component with regard to the interaction protocol required by its environment. To deal with this problem, a new discipline, Software Adaptation, is emerging. Software Adaptation promotes the use of adaptors-specific computational entities guaranteeing that software components will interact in the right way not only at the signature level, but also at the protocol and semantic levels. This paper summarizes the results and conclusions of the First Workshop on Coordination and Adaptation Techniques for Software Entities (WCAT'04). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increment of the complexity of systems requires new techniques that allow manipulating it adequately. Software architecture is becoming an important part of software design, which helps developers to handle the complexity of large systems. In addition, the management of the evolution as well as the maintenance of complex systems are two of most important problems to be solved by software engineering. Several solutions have been considered, one of them being the separation of concerns. These concepts have been extended along the life cycle and thus, Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD) arose. In this paper the architectural design phase and Aspect Oriented concepts are considered jointly. A proposal introducing aspects modelling in the architecture design phase is presented. The research is based on the combined use of a conventional architecture description language and an exogenous co-ordination model. When new requirements are going to be included in the system, the proposal provides the required steps to allow its evolution and maintenance by specifying an Aspect Oriented Architecture, which will permit us to change the system easily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]