Invited Speaker
Title: Towards a Framework for Managing Software Families
Abstract: Software surrounds us and drives our lives. A demand for highly customized products leads to the creation of software product lines families of software variants with similar, yet not identical functionality. For example, the Samsung's Galaxy S line includes over
two dozen smartphones, each with its own variation of software. Developing and maintaining such a large set of software variants is a challenging task.
In the last two decades, numerous software product line engineering approaches have been proposed, each aiming to help develop product lines in an efficient manner. Surprisingly, they are rarely used in practice. In this talk, we investigate reasons for this lack of adoption. Focusing on the technical perspective, we identify and structure the support required for improving existing product line management practices in real-life organizations. We map the identified support to software analysis and transformation tasks.
We will then show that some of the identified tasks is poorly studied by existing works and look in detail on one of such tasks: merging artifacts of multiple products (a.k.a. n-way merge). We will show that the n-way problem is NP-hard, explore possible approximate solutions and propose our own heuristic n-may merge algorithm that is superior to other practical approaches in terms of its accuracy. We will conclude the talk by outlining future research agenda.
Bio:
Marsha Chechik is currently Professor and Bell University Labs Chair in Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
She is also Vice Chair of the Department. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1996. Prof. Chechik's research interests are in the application of formal methods to improve the quality of software.
She has authored over 100 papers in formal methods, software specification and verification, computer security and requirements engineering. In 2002-2003, Prof. Chechik was a visiting scientist at Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, NY and at Imperial College, London UK, and in 2013 -- at Stonybrook University. She is a member of IFIP WG 2.9 on Requirements Engineering and an Associate Editor of Journal on Software and Systems Modeling.
She is has been an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 2003-2007, 2010-2013. She regularly serves on program committees of international conferences in the areas of software engineering and automated verification. Marsha Chechik is a Program Committee Co-Chair of TACAS’16.
She has been a PC Co-Chair of the 2014 International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Co-Chair of the 2008 International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR), PC Co-Chair of the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CASCON), and PC Co-Chair of the 2009 International Conference on Formal Aspects of Software Engineering (FASE). She is a Member of ACM SIGSOFT and the IEEE Computer Society.