• Mar 12, 2013: FESCA'13 proceedings have been published in EPTCS
• Mar 10, 2013: Catia Trubiani accepted the invitation to give a tool tutorial at FESCA'13
• Mar 04, 2013: FESCA'13 programme is now available below
• Dec 06, 2012: FESCA deadline for paper registration/submission has been extended to December 10 / December 16, 2012!
• Dec 05, 2012: Vittorio Cortellessa accepted the invitation to give a keynote talk at FESCA'13
• Oct 20, 2012: EasyChair submission site is now open for  
  • paper registration (entering authors, title, abstract and keywords, 
    due December 05, 2012) and
  • paper submission (adding PDF to registered papers, 
    due December 12, 2012)
• May 18, 2012: FESCA'13 website was launched

Model-based software design has received considerable attention in industry and academia in the past decade. In recent years, the growing need for trustworthy software systems and the increased relevance of systems quality properties (e.g. reliability, performance, and scalability) have stimulated the emergence of formal techniques and architecture modelling approaches for the specification and implementation of software architectures. Both have to deal with an increasing complexity in software systems challenging analytical methods as well as modelling techniques. The techniques and approaches developed in this area can be beneficially applied in component-based systems’ and also in the recently emerged platforms, such as web-services and virtualised cloud environments.

FESCA aims at addressing the open question of how formal methods can be applied effectively to these new contexts and challenges. FESCA is interested in both the development and application of formal methods in architecture-based and model-driven development and tries to cross-fertilize their research and application.

One strength of FESCA is the link established between the formal methods community and the software engineering community by exploring how formal approaches can be exploited for the analysis of large software architectures. This aim of FESCA could be stated as follows:

Supporting Software Engineering Techniques through Formal Methods

We encourage submissions on formal techniques and their application that aid reasoning, analysis and certification of software applications. In this context, the following topics are examples of topics of particular concern:

• Architecture as a language: Building Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs)
  
  • Modelling formalisms for the analysis of concurrent, embeded or model-driven systems assembled of components;
  • Modelling formalisms in prediction, analysis and measurement of software quality attributes such as reliability, performance, or security;
• Properties of software models
  
  • Temporal properties (including liveness and safety) and their formal verification;
  • Interface compliance (interface-to-interface and interface-to implementation) and contractual use of components;
• Formal methods in Component-Based Software Development
  • Techniques for prediction and formal verification of system properties, including static and dynamic analysis;
  • Instrumentation and monitoring approaches, runtime management of applications;
  • (Semi-) automatic inference of analytical models for existing software systems;
• Formal methods in Model-Driven Software Development
  • Abstraction level in modelling formalisms;
  • Safer MDA through integration with formal methods;
  • Correctness of model transformations;
• Industrial case studies and experience reports.
  • Covering both legacy and model-driven systems

Submissions concentrating on specification techniques should involve an evaluation of the practical merit of their research and clearly state the analysis and reasoning techniques they enable. We also appreciate work of a formal nature with immediate value to the industrial context. We encourage not only mature research results, submissions presenting innovative ideas and early results are also of interest.

Three kinds of submissions are considered:

• regular papers (up to 15 pages) presenting original and unpublished work related to the workshop topics,
• position papers (up to 10 pages) presenting ideas and directions of interesting ongoing and yet unpublished research related to the workshop topics, and
• tool demonstration papers (up to 8 pages) presenting and highlighting the distinguishing features of a topic-related tool (co-developed by the authors).

The papers should be written in English, follow the EPTCS style, and respect the page limit. Papers are to be submitted via the EasyChair conference system, and need to be registered before submission (authors, title, abstract, keywords). All accepted papers are required to be presented at the workshop by one of the authors. Tool demonstration and position papers are required to state "Tool demonstration paper/Position paper" as a subtitle of the publication.

Final versions of accepted regular and position papers will be published in a volume of the Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS). The tool demonstration papers will not appear in the EPTCS proceedings, but will be included in the electronic pre-proceedings (distributed at the workhop) and made available on the workshop website.

• Paper registration: December 5, 2012 December 10, 2012
• Submission deadline: December 12, 2012 December 16, 2012
• Notification of acceptance: January 25, 2013
• Final versions due: February 8, 2013
• Workshop date: March 23, 2013

Vittorio Cortellessa (Università dell'Aquila)
Title: Tradeoff analysis of software quality attributes through optimization models

Abstract: Model-based analysis of software quality is usually tackled by considering each attribute in isolation (e.g. performance, reliability, security), without taking into account the intrinsic dependencies among attributes. For example, it is well-known that security mechanisms degrade software performance, or that expensive solutions have to be adopted for increasing software reliability. Nevertheless, few approaches have been introduced up today to model and quantify such dependencies, although they are becoming ever more relevant in modern software systems due to networked devices with limited resources and to the user perception of software quality that hardly separates specific attributes.

The consideration of quality attributes in isolation has certainly allowed to build quite complex models that are able to capture deep details of real software/hardware systems, but at the same time the analysis of these models often results to be incomplete or inaccurate.

This talk introduces the challenges of modeling and analyzing tradeoffs among software quality attributes and illustrates the potential of optimization models that have recently emerged as very effective instruments in the domain of quality analysis of modular software (i.e. component-based and service-oriented systems).

Catia Trubiani, Ph.D. (Università dell'Aquila (AQ), Italy)
Title: Performance antipatterns and feedback in software architectures

Abstract: The problem of interpreting the results of performance analysis is quite critical in the software performance domain: mean values, variances, and probability distributions are hard to interpret for providing feedback to software architects. Support to the interpretation of such results that helps to fill the gap between numbers and architectural alternatives is still lacking. This tutorial is aimed at illustrating PANDA (Performance Antipatterns aNd FeeDback in software Architectures), i.e. a framework for addressing the results interpretation and the feedback generation problems by means of performance antipatterns, that are recurring solutions to common mistakes (i.e. bad practices) in the software development. Such antipatterns can play a key role in the software performance domain, since they can be used in the search of performance problems as well as in the formulation of their solutions in terms of architectural alternatives.

• Barbora Bühnová, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
• Lucia Happe, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Jan Kofroň, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

Contact address: fesca2013(at)easychair.org, please include the keyword FESCA in the email subject.

Ivana Černá (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Ludovic Henrio (CNRS, France)
Petr Hnetynka (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)
Samuel Kounev (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Heiko Koziolek (ABB Research Ladenburg, Germany)
Ralf Küsters (Universität Trier, Germany)
Markus Lumpe (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
Raffaela Mirandola (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Dorina Petriu (Carleton Univesity, USA)
Ralf Reussner (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Cristina Seceleanu (Mälardalen University, Sweden)
Dennis Westermann (SAP Research, Germany)
Steffen Zschaler (King's College London, UK)

PC co-chairs:
Barbora Bühnová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Lucia Kapová (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Jan Kofroň (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)

Please follow the information at ETAPS 2013 website.

The previous FESCA workshops at ETAPS 2004-2012 enjoyed high-quality submissions and attracted a number of recognized guest speakers, including Manfred Broy (Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany), Ivana Černá (Masaryk University, Czech Republic), José Luiz Fiadeiro, (University of Leicester, UK), Constance L. Heitmeyer (Naval Research Laboratory, USA), Rolf Hennicker (LMU, Munich, Germany), Samuel Kounev (KIT, Germany), František Plášil (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) and Martin Wirsing (LMU, Munich, Germany). It is expected that FESCA 2013 will make an equally positive contribution.