1st International Workshop on Designing Software

April 15, 2024

Co-located with ICSE 2024, Lisbon, Portugal

Software design is a set of activities and decisions that are involved in the construction of a software system, ranging from high-level architecture and conceptual design to code design. Decisions made during a design process have long-lasting impact on various qualities of a system, such as modularity, maintainability, scalability, robustness, security, usability, and performance. Despite its important role in software development, design is a subject that is still relatively little understood by both researchers and engineers – particularly in terms of design as an activity rather than design as a product/outcome. Although exceptions exist, in practice, design is frequently carried out in a somewhat ad-hoc, implicit manner. Teams often succeed in some way, though not always. Collectively, the research community has to date little systematic understanding of what makes certain designs and design processes successful, how to package and transfer knowledge about design and designing between teams and organizations, and how to design systems that are robust against a continuously evolving context. Teaching software design also remains a challenge for educators, with design being considered a skill that is acquired mainly through experience rather than something that can be taught in classrooms.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and educators who are interested in any aspect of software design, though we hope to place a specific focus on designing software as an activity in which developers, teams, and organizations engage. The workshop seeks to identify new directions and open challenges for the field. The workshop will be highly interactive and discussion-based, centered around a core set of topics on software design research and education. Each session will begin with short presentations by participants on a topic and proceed with breakout sessions to discuss the topic in depth. The outcome of the workshop is expected to be a report summarizing open problems, promising approaches, and next steps for advancing the state-of-the-art in software design practices and education.

Call for Contributions

We invite submissions of: (1) position papers on visions or new directions for software design (max. 4 pages), (2) research papers presenting novel contributions on software design (max. 6 pages), (3) experience reports describing lessons learned in a practical or educational setting (max. 6 pages), and (4) proposals for presentations (max. 2 pages). Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Empirical studies on software design
  • Cognitive and social aspects of software design
  • Designing software in hybrid and remote settings
  • The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on software design; the role of design in AI-assisted software development
  • Processes and evaluation standards for software design research
  • Software design methodologies, principles, strategies, and patterns
  • Case studies of design successes and failures
  • Approaches for software design education, including pedagogies, curriculum development, and case studies
  • AI-assisted software design education
  • Theory building for/of software design
  • Software design for social dimensions (e.g., ethics, sustainability, privacy)
  • Software design for emerging domains (e.g., cyber-physical systems, IoT)
  • Rigorous approaches to software design (e.g., modeling and validation)

Important Dates

  • Dec 7Dec 15, 2023: Workshop paper submission (site)
  • Jan 11Jan 14, 2024: Acceptance notification
  • Jan 25, 2024: Camera ready submission
  • Apr 15, 2024: Workshop date

Submission Instructions

  • Contributions should be submitted through the EasyChair site. All proceedings (except the talk proposals) will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
  • Submissions should be written in the official ACM Primary Article Template, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page.
  • For LaTeX users, please use the following document class: \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}

Workshop Program

Time Session
9:00 Opening
9:10 Keynote
  Justin Erenkrantz (MLB)
Evolving System Design While Tracking Live Pitches and Players For Thousands of Games!
10:10 Design exploration
  Design Spaces and How Software Designers Use Them: a sampler. Mary Shaw and Marian Petre
  The Architect in the Maze: On the Effective Usage of Automated Design Exploration. J. Andres Diaz-Pace and David Garlan
  Challenges in Creating Effective Automated Design Environments: an experience report from the domain of generative manufacturing. David Garlan, Bradley Schmerl, Javier Cámara and Rebekka Wohlrab
10:40 Coffee break
11:00 Education
  Developing and Applying an Essence-based Description of the Attribute-Driven Design Method. Stefan Malich, Humberto Cervantes and Rick Kazman.
  Teaching Software Architecture Design - Building Intuition. Gaurav Agerwala and Len Bass
  Investing in Software Design. Steven Fraser and Dennis Mancl
  Software Engineering Education: Towards Ethical, Reliable, and Beautiful Software. Aikya Inuganti, Madhuri Goyal and Mohammad Samarah
11:40 Discussion: Design exploration & education
12:30 Lunch
2:00 Tooling
  Executable Multi-Layered Software Models. Lukáš Radoský and Ivan Polášek
  From Requirements to Architecture: An AI-Based Journey to Semi-Automatically Generate Software Architectures. Tobias Eisenreich, Sandro Speth and Stefan Wagner
  TAMVE: Properties of Design Technologies to Address Challenges to Software Design in the Era of Agility and Frameworks. Timothy Lethbridge
2:30 Domain-specific design
  Co-Designing Resilient Socio-Technical Software Systems. Tamara Lopez, Helen Sharp and Michel Wermelinger
  Weighted Metrics for the Development of Energy Efficient Software. Déaglán Connolly Bree and Mel Ó Cinnéide
2:50 Discussion: Tooling & domain-specific design
3:30 Coffee break
4:00 Panel: Michel Chaudron, Rick Kazman, Marian Petre, Mary Shaw, and Liming Zhu
5:00 Closing & future of Designing

Organizing Committee

Program Committee

  • Joanne Atlee (University of Waterloo, Canada)
  • David Budgen (University of Durham, UK)
  • Janet Burge (Colorado College, USA)
  • George Fairbanks (Google, USA)
  • Regina Hebig (University of Rostock, Germany)
  • John Hosking (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
  • Daniel Jackson (MIT, USA)
  • Rick Kazman (University of Hawaii, USA)
  • Michael Keeling (Kiavi, USA)
  • Thomas LaToza (George Mason University, USA)
  • Clayton Lewis (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
  • Adriana Meza Soria (IBM, USA)
  • Leonardo Murta (Federal University of Fluminense, Brazil)
  • Rob van Ommering (Philips Research North America, USA)
  • Ipek Ozkaya (CMU Software Engineering Institute, USA)
  • Marian Petre (Open University, UK)
  • Mary Shaw (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  • Antony Tang (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
  • Claudia Werner (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
  • Lu Xiao (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Neil Ernst (University of Victoria, CA)