I'm attending the MiSE (Modeling in Software Engineering) Workshop 2009, part of the ICSE'09 conference. So far, it's been a very interesting event so I thought I should blog about it for all of you that cannot attend.

In this first day we had four full paper presentations (all papers are available in the IEEE Digital library but if you don't have access and want to read a paper I'm sure the authors will gladly send you a copy):

Toward Engineered Architecture Evolution by Chaki, Diaz-Pace, Garlan, Gurfinkel, Ozkaya proposes an approach to engineer the process of architecture evolution. Given the final architecture we want to target, they split the evolution process in a sequence of steps where each step applies a transformation operator to evolve the current architecture. During the paper discussion, the main question was whether we could really assume that we know the target architecture when we start evolving the current one. In fact, to me, the problem of selecting the right architecture for a given system is the biggest challenge. I'd like to see an expert system that, given a prioritized list of non-functional requirements (cost, flexibility, security,...) could recommend me: 1 - an architectural style and 2 - a set of technologies/products to implement that style (many of the performance characteristics largely depend more on the specific software components used in the architecture that on the properties of the style itself).

In Relationship-Based Change Propagation: A Case Study by Cabot, Chechik, Diskin, Easterbrook, Lai, Nejati we discuss how to relate models at different abstraction levels by explicitly defining relationships among them. The possible kinds of relationships are pre-defined at the meta-model level for each pair of model types. Relationships can then be used to facilitate change propagation (i.e. given a change on a higher-level abstraction model, what are the changes we have to perform on the lower-level ones?). Our preliminary algorithm for change propagation informs the designer about the parts of the down-stream model that need not to be changed and points to the parts that have to be manually completed to correctly evolve it (kind of "fill in the gaps" process). This is still a preliminary work (as many attendees kindly pointed out) but we are working on generalizing the results.

Raising the Level of Abstraction in the Development of GMF-based Graphical Model Editors by Kolovos, Rose, Paige, Pollack provides an alternative way of defining a graphical modeling framework for our domain-specific languages, specially useful for non-GMF experts. Given a textual description of the meta-model plus some simple annotations, EuGENia generates all required GMF-models. The paper discussion was focus on the typical usability vs expressivity trade-off. More expressive annotations allow to support more complex frameworks but as a trade-off we lose the simplicity of the approach. It was suggested that EuGENia can be used as a first step. Then designers requiring more advanced features could extend the generated GMF models (exactly as they would do in the "normal" process).

Tailoring a Model-Driven Quality-of-Service DSL for Various Stakeholders by Oberortner, Zdun, Dustdar . This papers deals with the problem of how to involve different kinds of users/stakeholders (specially non-technical ones) in the definition, validation and use of domain specific languages. The solution? Divide the DSL into multiple (related) sub-languages at different abstraction levels and tailor each sub-language to a specific kind of stakeholder.

The day ended with the presentation of two posters on inconsistency resolution and on V&V approaches for UML.

Btw, some other colleagues from the U of Toronto are also live blogging from the conference. The aggregated feed can be found here