WICSA is a working conference and in 2005 continues the tradition of providing working sessions as a forum for researchers and practitioners to come together in a setting supportive of communication of the latest results and most pressing needs from these communities.
Every software system has an architecture; for decades practitioners have been designing, managing, and exploiting architectures. Through these experiences practitioners have gained a wealth of knowledge of what works and what doesn't work. Researchers have been developing theories, methods, and tools to support the development and use of software architecture but are generally restricted to testing their results and tools on toy architectures and with hopes that the results will be a value to practitioners. Although it is natural for practitioners as well researchers to go their separate ways, it is extremely valuable for both to meet and exchange views, insights and results.
WICSA 2005 working sessions will focus specifically on the transfer of information on best and worst experiences from the trenches and descriptions of areas where research progress is slowed because of lack of access to real world problems. Working sessions will be used to collect examples of existing best practices; identify characteristics of existing methods and techniques; identify gaps in the state of the practice; and propose new research directions to fill those gaps.
Reports and position statements are sought by the working session organizers
that describe the author's past experiences, both positive and negative,
or ideas for developing new methods and techniques. These papers will
be different from papers submitted to the technical papers track in that
they are intended to stimulate discussion related to the experience or
ideas rather than to present results for use by the community. Based on
topics covered in accepted reports and position statements, working sessions
will be organized to provide a forum for further discussion. Topics of
interest will include (but not be limited
to) the following themes:
Reports/position statements can be of any length but must not exceed 10 pages in IEEE conference paper format (http://www.computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm) and should be submitted by May 31st to the WICSA5 submission site.