As with the previous post, the following papers piqued my interest during their presentation, and are potentially cool papers.
Challenges in Automotive Software Engineering (Keynote)
Authors: Manfred Broy
It figures that I’d start with a presentation that has no matching paper, eh? The whole presentation was rather interesting, but here are a couple key points that are relevant to my research:
- Integrating all the control units found in a car is complicate by the combinatorial explosion resulting from the combination of optional features.
- There is heavy use of automatic code generation based on models in this arena. While I didn’t completely grasp the extent and the ramifications of this, it’s something to keep in mind when targeting these types of applications.
- A while back I was told that the automobile industry would love to use radios to communicate information between control units. This was routed in the desire to reduce the weight associated with the all the wiring involved with standard techniques. Well, it seems that even with wired networks on the car, there’s a more compelling problem: non-determinism. The old protocol “CAN” is being replaced by new technologies that using (some variation of) time division to guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth to each control unit. If we want to replace wired networks, we’re going to have to consider this problem which is very much non-trivial in wireless networks.
40 Years of Middleware
Presenter: Wolfgang Emmerich
Overall, this was a fun presentation. It’s hard to report exactly what was said since it was mostly a detailed historical retrospective of the evolution of middleware. Wolfgagng Emmerich did an excellent job of researching and presenting this information, and referred to a paper recently published (in TSE?) that contains much of the information presented. This paper ought to be an interesting read.
As a side note, many people in my lab have discussed “what is middleware” with varring degrees of success. The definition used for this presentation included two aspects: (1) multiple hosts (physical or logical), (2) heterogeneity, and (3) distribution. It’s probably worth looking up this paper to at least look at and consider the definition of Middleware presented there.
Asking and Answering Why and Why Not Questions about Program Behavior
Authors: Andrew Ko, Brad Myers
Paper: PDF, Tool Homepage
ICSE08 Distinguished paper award
This was cool, and defiantly worth a read. I’ll likely force this paper on my lab when I get back, even though it’s outside our research area. 
The biggest open question in my mind at the end of the presentation was weather the tool can be (easily) applied to unit/integration testing implementations. The presentation clearly focused on the ability to integrate ith GUI-based applications, so it’s hopefully just a less glamorous version of the same underlying engine.
TODO or To Bug: Exploring How Task Annotations Play a Role in the Work Practices of Software Engineers
Authors: Margaret-Anne Storey, Jody Ryall, Ian Bull, Del Myers, Janice Singer
Paper: PDF will be available here some day
This research focused on the in-line comments that developers leave to themselves (and others) in the form of “TODO”, “FixMe”, and similar tags. I didn’t find the results particularly suprizing, but that might be due to wonderful presentation of the material. Again, this is outside my research area, but probably a paper that I’ll be reading to solidiy my pre-existing notions.