Succeedings of the 8th international workshop on software specification and design

• Authors: Jeff Kramer;Alexander L. Wolf
• Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
• Year: 1996

The 8th International Workshop on Software Specification and Design (IWSSD-8) was held at Schloss Velen, Germany, in March 1996. In order to foster informed and fruitful discussions, the workshop was an invitation-only event of limited size. Based on formal submissions, approximately 60 people were selected and invited. Like its predecessors, IWSSD-8 maintained the principle that the accepted papers should serve as background material for the workshop. Therefore, the workshop did not include formal paper presentations, but rather provided an opportunity to engage in real work, with intensive discussions focussed around major themes. Each theme was discussed in a separate working group directed by a Working Group Chair who organized their group members so as to discuss the research issues of that particular theme. This year the themes selected were Requirements Engineering, Design Engineering, Software Architecture, and Concurrency/Distribution.IWSSD has established a tradition of using "case studies" as a focus for individual working groups. These case studies, supplied in advance to participants, have proved to be a fruitful way of working. Evidence of this can be seen most clearly in the "succeedings" or workshop reports which have followed previous workshops. It was decided that for IWSSD-8, in order to provide common ground between the themes, a single common case study should be used. The "Report on the Inquiry into the London Ambulance Service" was selected, with each theme drawing on it in a manner appropriate to their own interests and concerns.The London Ambulance Service (LAS) is briefly summarized below and discussed in the first paper appearing in the proceedings. The case study was presented in a plenary session at the beginning of the workshop and the findings of the different working groups presented and discussed at the end of the workshop, again in a plenary session. In order to make best use of the time available, working group members were asked to prepare for the workshop by familiarizing themselves with the case study and the major issues in their area relevant to that case study. We believe that this format made it both attractive and rewarding for people to attend, and was a major reason for the success of this workshop.