FlexiTools 2011 - FlexiTools 2011 ICSE 2011 Workshop on Flexible Modeling Tools

FlexiTools 2011
ICSE 2011 Workshop on Flexible Modeling Tools
Sunday, May 22, 2011, Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Welcome
During the exploratory phases of design, it is more common to use white boards, pen and paper or other informal mechanisms than modeling tools. During the early stages of requirements engineering, it is more common to use office tools. These informal approaches are easy to learn and give the user great freedom, among other advantages. Yet, as in many other tasks throughout the software lifecycle, the advantages of modeling tools would be valuable too: multiple views, providing domain-specific assistance, ensuring consistency, etc.

Formal modeling tools and more informal but flexible, free-form approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses. Whichever practitioners choose for a particular task, they lose the advantages of the other, with attendant frustration and loss of productivity. What can be done about this unfortunate dichotomy? Flexible modeling tools that blend the advantages of modeling tools and the more free-form approaches would allow users to make tradeoffs between flexibility and precision/formality and to move smoothly between them. They might be modeling tools with added flexibility, or office tools with added modeling support, or tools of a new kind.

The focus of the workshop will be on challenge problems in the area of flexible modeling. In burgeoning fields, it is valuable for the community to identify key, difficult problems that help to define the research area and serve as a means of evaluating the the success of proposed solutions in that area. The concrete goals of this workshop are to identify a foundational set of challenges and concerns for the field of flexible modeling, and promising directions for addressing each. To that end, it will bring together people who understand tool users' needs, usability, user interface design and tool infrastructure.