Industry Track for Software Language EngineeringITSLE 2016

Industry Track for Software Language Engineering (ITSLE) is a workshop to bring together practitioners and researchers from industry and academia working on the area of software language engineering. Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) techniques are being developed and used broadly in industry. However, as the size and complexity of software systems steadily increase, so does the cost of maintaining and improving the DSL and MDSE techniques and tools. It introduces new challenges such as language co-evolution, maintainability of legacy software using older version of DSLs and MDSE techniques, and extendability and scalability of these techniques. Some of these challenges have been addressed by the SLE research community and some remain unsolved.

The ITSLE is therefore dedicated to both SLE research organizations and industrial partners who are willing to share their challenges, industrial experiences and research results applicable to the industry. We seek high-quality contributions from practitioners as well as industrial and academic researchers. The workshop is a continuation of successful editions organized in 2011, 2012 and 2014.

Accepted Papers

ITSLE 2016 Call for Papers

The goal of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners from academia and industry together to learn more about the challenges of software language engineering in industry and define future research directions inspired by the industrial challenges.

Topics of Interest

The ITSLE is dedicated to both SLE research organizations and industrial partners who are willing to share their challenges, industrial experiences and research results applicable to the industry. We seek high-quality contributions from practitioners as well as industrial and academic researchers.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Experiences in, and industrial application of language design and implementation

• Language verification and validation

• Engineering and maintaining the DSL and MDSE techniques and tools

• Maintainability of legacy software using older version of DSLs and MDSE techniques

• Integration and interoperability of DSLs and MDSE tools

• Extendability and scalability of DSL and MDSE techniques

Types of Submissions

Papers can be submitted in the following categories:

• Full papers (8 pages) presenting novel research ideas, contribution to the state-of-the-art, and overall interest to industrial application of SLE and MDSE techniques.

• Industrial papers or experience reports (5 pages) sharing industrial experience, challenges, research or technical problems, and case studies.

• Position (5 pages) raising new ideas, challenges, ongoing research or early research results applicable to industry, and future research directions inspired by industrial challenges and experiences.

• Tool demonstration papers (2 pages) addressing technical foundations, novelty, and industrial relevance as stability, robustness and its potential for broad application.

Publications

Contributed papers must not have been previously published or currently be submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the ACM SIGPLAN Conference Format. All accepted papers (all types) will be published in ACM Digital Library.

Lessons Learned about Language Engineering from the Development of mbeddr

Over the last five years we have built mbeddr, a collection of integrated languages and language extensions built with the Jetbrains MPS language workbench. mbeddr consists of 81 languages, incl. IDE support, 34 of them C extensions. The mbeddr languages use a wide variety of notations – textual, tabular, symbolic and graphical – and the C extensions are modular; new extensions can be added without changing the existing implementation of C. mbeddr’s development has spanned roughly 15 person years so far, and the tool is used in practice and continues to be developed. This makes mbeddr a case study in language engineering of non-trivial size and complexity. In this keynote, I look back at mbeddr’s development to identify what worked well and what are still challenges in language engineering with a modern language workbench. I will address five areas: language modularity, notational freedom and projectional editing, mechanisms for managing complexity, performance and scalability issues and the consequences for the development process. I will close by highlighting a set of issues which need further research and engineering.

About the Speaker

Dr. Markus Voelter works as an independent researcher, consultant and coach, currently mostly for itemis AG in Stuttgart, Germany. His focus is on language engineering and language workbenches, but also modeling, software architecture and product line engineering. Markus also regularly writes (articles, patterns, books) and speaks (trainings, conferences) on those subjects. He has a diploma degree in technical physics from FH Ravensburg-Weingarten and a PhD in computer science from Delft University of Technology.

Model Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) in the large

MDSE is a discipline that only recently has begun to be used in mainstream practice. At the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA), we use this approach successfully for a major part of the Dutch Social Benefits system, a nationwide online system serving 6 million citizens. We report on our experiences with bringing forth and maintaining this system, and on our future plans for extending this approach to other key systems of our organisation. The DTCA is responsible for (amongst others) collecting taxes and paying social benefits. The supporting software system typically have a lot of functionality and process huge volumes of data. Furthermore, the systems should be easy to adapt within short notice: laws do change often, and once a change to a law has been approved by the parliament, there is only little time to implement the changes. To adapt complex systems quickly, we use Functional Model Driven Development (FMDD), a variant of MDSE. The FMDD approach separates functionality from other aspects of an application, hence its name. We outline the basic way of working by describing the main artifacts and roles. A key feature of our approach is separation of concerns. We organize the specifications and transformations such that different concerns are separated from each other. We detail some of the techniques we applied in the Social Benefits System.