[ecoop-info] Joint CFP: Workshops at WCRE 2012

[Bram Adams]

[We apologize for multiple reception of this CFP.]



                  Joint CFP: Workshops at WCRE 2012
19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE)

              October 15-18, Kingston, Ontario (Canada)

                http://www.distat.unimol.it/wcre2012/


(1) International workshop on Controversial Implementation Choices (CIC)

Deadline: September 10, 2012

https://sites.google.com/site/iwcic12/home

Angela Lozano, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain La Neuve, Belgium
Javier Perez, Université Mons, Mons, Belgium
Naouel Moha, Université de Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada


A Controversial Implementation Choice (CIC) is an implementation choice to
avoid because it is associated with harmful effects. Examples of CICs include 
violations of design principles, bad smells, anti-patterns, code smells, design 
flaws, disharmonies, etc. Although there are several arguments against CICs 
there are not enough empirical studies to support their claimed effects. Moreover, 
gathering empirical evidence on implementation choices requires careful control. 
This lack of evidence make these suggestions difficult to use or prioritize. 

The goal of the workshop is to analyze and discuss, the current state of the field, 
as well as the open challenges and future trends, specially focused in experimen-
tation issues. In particular, the workshop aims to identify pitfalls to avoid, as well as 
assumptions to ensure in order to collect conclusive evidence. Reports on failed and 
successful experiments are welcomed.  We would like to document experiments with 
negative results so that the community is aware of experimental set-ups that 
produced inconclusive evidence. The experiments include but are not limited to 
assessing how ‘bad/good’ a CIC is, the relations among different types of CIC’s, 
user studies, novel detection approaches (data extracted, usage of repositories, 
bug reports, mail lists, visual / auditive approaches), and diverse approaches to 
prioritize the treatment of diverse CIC’s. Papers are expected to present the set-up 
of their empirical studies, raise novel issues, and propose viewpoints to tackle these 
issues in 4 pages. The experimental set-up should contain hypotheses, definitions 
(including tools used, where can they be obtained, and the configuration used), 
type of experiment, data collected, expected results, obtained results, and a discus-
sion of why it was or not successful. 


(2) 2nd Workshop on Mining Unstructured Data (MUD’12)

Deadline: September 21, 2012

http://sailhome.cs.queensu.ca/mud 

Alberto Bacchelli, Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland
Nicolas Bettenburg, Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Latifa Guerrouj, SOCCER Lab, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada


Today’s software developers are supported by a variety of tools, such as version 
control systems like GIT, Issue Tracking Systems like BugZilla, and mailing list 
services. As such we have a wide range of information recorded in the repositories 
in which these tools store their data. These repositories comprise two types of 
data: Structured Data and Unstructured Data. Structured data, such as source 
code or execution traces, has a well-established structure and grammar, and is 
straightforward to parse and use with computer machinery. Unstructured data, 
such as documentation, discussions, comments, customer support requests, 
consists of a mixture of natural language text, snippets of structured data, and 
noise. Mining unstructured data poses many hard challenges, since out-of-the 
box approaches adopted from related fields such as Natural Language Processing 
(NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) cannot be directly applied in the Software 
Engineering domain. The goal of this half-day workshop is to address these 
challenges and aims to make the knowledge contained in unstructured data 
repositories accessible to practitioners and researchers.


(3) Workshop on The Law and Reverse Engineering

Deadline: N/A (no paper submissions)

Keith Gallagher, Department of Computing Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology
Cem Kaner, Department of Computing Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology
Jenifer Deignan, Department of Computing Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology

[Supported by National Science Foundation Grant 0629454: Learning Units on Law 
 and Ethics in Software Engineering]


Almost all software contracts that are not open-source contain broad
bans on reverse engineering, but as far as we can tell, almost all
professional software development does reverse engineering to some
degree. This is a fundamental, unresolved conflict. Every student and
practitioner of software engineering will face reverse engineering
issues and they will have to make their own decisions about what is
fair and reasonable in their situation, what risks they are willing
to accept, and what corporate policies they should follow, support,
or challenge.  The industry is polarized and it will probably be a
decade or more before the next generation of leadership revisits this
conflict in a constructive way. For now, the statutes and the courts
offer insufficient guidance.  We plan to highlight the issues of
the law and reverse engineering through examples. Each exemplar
case will be drawn either from an actual lawsuit or from a technical
advance in reverse engineering. Rather than telling particiants what
to do, we will lay out the factors that we think they should
consider.