Advanced techniques for understanding, profiling, and debugging object oriented systems

Abstract

This workshop was held on Sunday, prior to the actual conference. Participants were invited, based on a short position paper in which they explained what they think is missing in currently available tools for understanding, profiling and debugging of 00 systems. Half the people that responded came from academia, the other half from the software industry. Which was a nicely balanced participation. The phrase " workshop " suggests that participants have to work. However, our experiences from a couple of workshops, was that many of them look more like mini-conferences. Typically, there are too many paper presentations, and people are often forced to be much too passive. As a contrast, the nature of our workshop was intended to have no paper presentations at all. Instead, the participants very briefly presented who they were, told the rest where they came from, and were given an opportunity to show at most two slides. After these short presentations, we started the process of gathering issues. Very quickly, a list of issues was developed, and smaller groups were formed to discuss the topics in more detail. Some topics were more popular than others. After these sessions, the groups merged again for a session of issue gathering At the end of the day, we tried to collect some interesting conclusions to be presented as a panel at the panel sessions, to be started on Monday, the next day. This collection process was a little bit difficult, and kind of reflects the learning experience from a workshop with such an intensive nature. We did not have paper presentations, but people had a lot of interesting discussions, and it is very difficult to report on the results of a collection of many different discussions among enthusiastic people held during the day. This paper will show how to get your hands on the list of position papers that were sent in by the participants. This will give you an idea of the state-of-the-art of this subject. Furthermore, the issues that were raised in the different sessions will be discussed.