The goal of IT departments within large enterprises is to deliver technology solutions that support the services and operation of the business, i.e. its business architecture. In order to meet this goal the application architecture specification needs to be traceable to the business architecture specification. The specification of how a component specification will be implemented and deployed, its technical architecture, needs to be traceable to the application architecture.

Recently, modeling and component technologies started playing an important role in development of enterprise applications, but modeling and components do not provide sufficient means for development of business aligned software architectures. What is needed is an architecture framework consisting of methods for specifying architectures, including the different views of architecture, guidelines for deciding the levels of abstraction at which architectures will be specified, and principles describing how abstractions are derived from each other. Such a framework will meet the goals described above.

The goal of the workshop is to identify key issues in developing business aligned software architecture and to identify a set of best practices for dealing with introduction of the architecture program in an enterprise.

Themes of the Workshop

The themes of the workshop are object-oriented software architectures in enterprise systems. Advances in modeling and component technology have significantly improved the state of the art of software development on the design and implementation level. However, architecting large-scale systems is still an area where there are no clear guidelines or standards.

Some of the issues that are addressed in this domain are:

• Application architecture in view of business goals
• Principles and guidelines for development of business aligned software architectures
• Structural and behavioral specification of software architectures
• Validation of software architectures
• Reference application and component architectures
• Documenting software architectures
• Technical and organizational processes involved in development of business aligned architectures

Goals of the Workshop

The goal of the workshop is to identify key issues in developing business aligned software architecture and to identify a set of best practices for dealing with introduction of the architecture program in an enterprise.

Submission Guidelines

We seek high-quality submissions in two categories:

• Full technical papers, describing original, unpublished research (10 pages).
• Work-in-progress papers, describing on-going work and interim results (6 pages).

All accepted papers will be posted at the workshop website prior to the workshop date for participants to read them before they attend the workshop.

Submission dates

Deadline for paper submissions: August 26th, 2001

Notification of acceptance or rejection: September 3th, 2001

Workshop date: October 15th, 2001

Submission Method

Please send your position paper as one of the following:

• PDF ( preferred - please embed fonts)
• PostScript
• HTML

Please use the e-mail address: ws_oopsla_2001@inferdata.com

Contact Information

Organizer Backgrounds

Vladimir Bacvanski

Vladimir has over a decade of engineering experience with research and development of object-oriented software systems. He has been architecting and developing systems for leading companies in the areas such as mission-critical and distributed object-oriented systems, rule-based systems and languages, object-oriented CASE tools, real-time diagnostic systems, agent technology and business rules. Vladimir has published numerous papers including contributions to books, and has been invited speaker, chair and organizer at leading conferences in the area of object-oriented and knowledge-based systems. He is the recipient of several grants and awards including participation at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Real-Time Computing. He received doctoral degree from Aachen University of Technology (RWTH Aachen) in Germany.

John Vernon

John has 15 years solid experience in the broad spectrum of computer software engineering. His customers and employers include Fortune 50 companies in the finance, telecommunications, manufacturing and aerospace business sectors. He has architected and implemented large-scale software systems, mentored, trained and institutionalized object-oriented software best practices and technologies in development teams. He is a Vice-President and Senior Technical Architect at J P Morgan Chase, consulting to development teams worldwide. He is Lead Methodologist in development of a standards-based model-driven architecture framework that will be deployed in J P Morgan Chase worldwide. Architected e-commerce solutions based on EJB and CORBA.

Planned Workshop Activities

The participants will have opportunity to read all the papers before the workshop. We would like to focus on discussions during the workshop.

Proposed agenda:

1. Welcome and introduction.
2. Selected participants will present ideas representing main trends.
3. Organizers will propose identification of key issues. Participants will discuss and select the issues they will explore in small groups (ideally 3-5 people).
4. Participants work in small groups. Each group prepares a summary of their findings.
5. Each group presents the findings to participants.

Post-Workshop Activities

The organizers will prepare a report on the findings from the workshop. The report will present the discussion of issues and recommendations for what researchers and practitioners can do to improve the development of business aligned software architectures. The report will be published on the web site of the workshop. The report will be advertised on the Internet. Depending on the quality of submitted papers, workshop organizers will work with a publishing house to create a proceedings.

Previous Workshops on the Subject

In the past there were workshops on architectural issues, however, we have not seen the adequate coverage of issues that we would like to discuss in our workshop. Some workshops that were related, but were not exact match for our topic.

• Patterns in Software Architecture: The Development Process, OOPSLA 2000
• Second Workshop on Object-Oriented Architectural Evolution, ECOOP 2000
• Business Object Component Design and Implementation, OOPSLA'99
• Object-Oriented Architectural Evolution, ECOOP'99
• First Working IFIP Conference on Software Architecture, 1999