Industrial Track Session -Introduction

Abstract

The European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR), is well-known to be an open conference on the theory and practice of maintenance, reengineering and evolution of software systems. It promotes discussion and interaction among researchers and practitioners about the development of maintainable systems, and the evolution, migration and reengineering of existing ones. CSMR’s Industrial Track focuses on discussions of industrial practice and experience reports, describing problems (and their solutions) encountered in the evolution of huge industrial software applications of companies from all across Europe. Accordingly, the Industrial Track of CSMR 2008 includes four (4) peer-reviewed short papers reporting industrial cases and illustrating lessons learned from real-world applications of techniques for software maintenance and reengineering. The paper of G. Lajios, D. Schmedding and F. Volmering, entitled “Supporting Language Conversion by Metric Based Reports”, deals with the problem of integrating existing software into a new system environment without redeveloping it from scratch. This problem can be tackled by source code conversion which sometimes is considered the best solution because of strategic reasons. The authors propose a report generation tool that analyses legacy code and finds language features that helps developers find out which parts of a software system can be converted automatically from C++ to Java, which parts need preediting, and which parts must be converted manually due to inherent difficulties. The paper of J. Pantos, A. Beszedes, P. Gyenizsey and Tibor Gyimothy, entitled “Experiences in Adapting a Source Code-Based Quality Assessment Technology”, deals with the open issue of the quality assessment of industry-applied software which, in most cases, is based merely on the continuous testing approach. This approach is quite expensive and does not provide adequate information on quality in many situations. Thus the authors present experiences in adapting an existing technology and tools suitable for quality assessment based on source code analysis. Based on experiences working on their study, the authors are convinced that the different kinds of metrics and code checking rules available today may not have a universal interpretation in arbitrary industrial environment. These techniques need to be appropriately adapted to be able to properly assess the quality of software in a specific environment. The paper of M. Kajko-Mattsson and C. Makridis, entitled “SLA Management Process Model”, deals with topic of the efficient management of Service Level Agreements (SLA) which organizations regard as a key factor for the delivery of qualified and cost-effective services. The authors give an outline of a SLA management model. This model reflects the current state of industrial practice since it been elicited within four industrial companies. The paper of S. Li, L. Tahvildari, W. Liu, M. Morrissey, and G. Cort, entitled “Coping with Requirements Changes in Software Verification and Validation” describes the major challenges in coping with requirements changes in the software verification and validation processes. The authors show a way to improve the maintainability of RDT test plans and test cases in order to cope with requirements changes in a systematic manner. The CSMR 2008 industrial track has collected well written short papers which could activate discussion about industrial experiences in the area of software maintenance and reengineering.