Submission deadline             June 30, 2008,

Large dimensions, high complexity, self-management, and ubiquity characterize today’s computer systems. It is expected that these features will be emphasized and prevail in systems to come, whether they relate to civilian, governmental or business applications. They call for entirely new approaches for designing, implementing, validating, maintaining, and exploiting software intensive systems.

With regard to the enterprise computing space, an evolution much sought for is driven by the need to bring business and IT together, i.e. to shift control of processes from IT professionals to business experts in order to scaling up business process management to support process of higher complexity.

Concerning software engineering a new approach, Model-Driven Engineering, upon which it is based, no longer considers the source code as a central element of software, it is rather considered as an element derived from model units. More generally, the source code becomes an element derived from the fusion or interweaving of model units. This approach becomes more and more important in the context of software and hardware architectures driven by standards such as MDA (Model-Driven Architecture) proposed by the standards authority OMG, Microsoft's Software Factories or IBM's proposal of EMF (Eclipse Modeling Software) tools.

Co-organized by TELECOM ParisTech, CS, and the "Génie Logiciel" quarterly, the 21st edition of the ICSSEA Conference (International Conference on Software & Systems Engineering and their Applications) will be held in Paris on December 9-11, 2008. It aims at providing a critical survey of the current status of tools, methods, and processes for elaborating software & systems, in gathering actors from the enterprise and research worlds.

However, lectures and discussions will be conducted with the evolution of software & system engineering as a leitmotiv.

TOPICS

As for previous editions, any topic concerning software engineering & systems engineering is eligible. However, the following topics will be particularly appreciated:

Architectures: composition, orchestration, semantically-enabled SOA, ontology-based technologies...

Components & reusability

Contract-oriented software development

Distributed computing: service-oriented computing, grid services, Web services, mobile applications...

Evolution (adaptability, maintainability, variability...): issues relating to model-driven software engineering, service-oriented software development, aspect-oriented software development and not limited to evolution of source code but also address other software artifacts:

databases, database schemas, design models, software architectures, process management Management of non-functional properties: analysis & design, representation, modeling, monitoring, composition, configurability, relationship with architecture, resolution of conflicts, aspect orientation, metrics for non-functional properties, semantic issues...

Open source issues: architectures for seamless integration/composition, quality assurance, Outsourcing issues Process engineering with different notations as UML, DoDAF, SysML … and the MDA, MDE approaches Project management Quality control & assurance: quality assessment, testing, V&V...

Quantitative evaluations: architecture, availability, performance, quality, reliability, safety...

Requirements engineering

Software platforms specific of application domains Systems engineering and Systems of Systems Trustworthiness Web engineering: design, composition, control flow, user interface migration, discovery and selection of services, ontology engineering...

All types of systems are eligible: adaptive, autonomous, context-aware, distributed, embedded, grid computing, mobile, real-time, service-oriented, ubiquitous, Web-based...

All end-user domains and economic areas are eligible: information systems, process management, automotive, avionics, banking, defense, energy, health care, insurance, telecommunications, transportation....

Papers submitted, original and unpublished, may concern industrial implementations or experiments, describe significant results from ongoing projects as well as research results susceptible of industrial applications, deal with socioeconomic issues associated with software & systems engineering, or propose tool demonstrations and posters. They should clearly describe the nature of the work presented, explain its contribution, highlight its novel features, and state precisely its current status.