4th International Workshop on Exception Handling (WEH.08)

Atlanta, GA, 14 November 2008, USA
Co-located with 16th International Symposium on the
Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 16)
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/WEH.08/

Call for Papers

MOTIVATION
A number of field studies have identified that error handling
design in the current practice of achieving industrial applications
typically exhibits poor quality independently of the underlying
programming language and application domain. As a consequence, it
does not seem pragmatic to think that the core problems of exception
handling reside exclusively in the design of contemporary programming
languages. Moreover, many researchers have demonstrated that exceptions
are a global design issue and that, as such, they should be systematically
treated across the software lifecycle.

Not surprisingly, the interest in exception handling has been
consistently growing in the software engineering community through
the last years. The relevance of the topic becomes even more evident
when we look at the number of recent work on exception handling in
key software engineering areas, such as contemporary modularisation
techniques (e.g. aspect-oriented programming and feature-oriented
programming), model-driven engineering, software evolution, refactoring,
empirical studies, software product lines, ubiquitous computing, and
formal methods. They are consistently appearing in the software engineering
literature and scattered across relevant journal publications and the
technical programs of top software engineering conferences.

GOALS
This workshop will provide a forum for presenting and discussing
research on exception handling in all areas of software development.
The participants will work together to identify exception handling
challenges in the whole software life cycle, methodological as well
as technical issues, modelling techniques and linguistic mechanisms.
In particular, we will be interested in discussing open research
questions in the following contexts:
- exception handling during early development phases, such as
requirements elicitation, specification and analysis;
- formal modelling, testing, validation and verification of
exception handling;
- model transformations and refinements in the presence of exceptions;
- best practice in exception handling engineering;
- exception handling in open, dynamic and ubiquitous systems.

Based on the workshop submissions, the workshop aims to
(i) debate the open issues on the interplay of exception handling
and software engineering;
(ii) bring the attention of the software engineering community to
the importance of exception handling in contemporary software
development;
(iii) motivate the expansion of systematic practice and research of
exception handling throughout the whole software lifecycle, and
(iv) foster a collaborative environment for both practitioners and
researchers interested in of innovative exception handling techniques.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
The workshop is intended to cover a wide range of topics, including
(but not limited to):
- Exceptions in software processes
- Empirical studies of exception handling engineering
- Exception documentation
- Exception handling and requirements engineering
- Exception handling and architectural design
- Design patterns and anti-patterns, architectural styles, and
good programming practice cookbooks
- Static analysis and testing of exception handling
- Refactoring and evolution of exception handling code
- Exceptions and variability management
- Exception handling in formal system development
- Comparative studies of innovative exception handling techniques
and conventional ones
- Exception handling and contemporary modularization techniques
(e.g. aspect-oriented programming)
- Exception handling and variability mechanisms
- Metrics and quality models for abnormal behaviour
- Exception handling and middleware design
- MDD for exceptions
- Exception handling in multi-agent systems
- Exception handling in service-oriented architectures
- Development of predictive models of defect rates
- Checked versus unchecked exceptions

WORKSHOP FORMAT AND SUBMISSIONS
WEH.08 is a one-day workshop with a strong focus on discussions.
Authors who plan to contribute with a paper are requested to submit a
position paper through the workshop website. The submission
must follow the FSE style guidelines. Papers should be submitted
electronically via CyberChairPRO in either Postscript (PS) or PDF
format.

We are soliciting the submission of two categories of position papers:
(i) traditional position papers (5-8 pages) related to workshop topics
(ii) very short position papers (1-2 pages), where the authors describe
their thoughts, lessons learned, or points of view with respect
to one or more workshop topics

Papers will be refereed by at least three reviewers. Moreover we
*especially* encourage authors to present their experience and/or novel
ideas on how to provide a modern software engineering
treatment of exception handling (shorter format). The papers chosen
for presentation should offer different or novel perspectives on the
workshop topics and they must have a high potential for generating
issues that will stimulate the discussions.

PROCEEDINGS
The proceedings will be published in the ACM digital library

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission: August 10, 2008
Notification: September 3, 2008
Camera-ready Paper: September 20, 2008
Workshop: November 14, 2008

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
William Bail, Mitre, USA
Dan Berry, University of Waterloo, Canada
Peter Allan Buhr, University of Waterloo, Canada
Nelio Cacho, Lancaster University, UK
Fernando Castor Filho, State Univ. of Pernambuco, Brazil
Phil Koopman, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
Axel van Lamsweerde, Univ. Cat. Louvain, Belgium
Wolfgang de Meuter, Vrije University Brussels, Belgium
Cecilia Rubira, University of Campinas, Brazil
Richard D. Schlichting, AT&T, USA
Francois Taiani, Lancaster University, UK
Anand Tripathi, University of Minneapolis, USA
Elena Troubitsyna, Aabo Akademi, Finland

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS
Alessandro Garcia, Lancaster University, UK
Christophe Dony, Montpellier-II University, France
Joeg Kienzle, Mcgill University, Canada
Alexander Romanovsky, Newcastle University, UK