Colloquium Atkinson

Abstract: Although they differ in how they decompose and conceptualize software systems, one thing that all advanced software engineering paradigms such as SOA, MDD and CBD have in common is that they increase the number of different views involved in visualizing a system. Managing these different views can be challenging even when a paradigm is used independently, but when they are used together the number of views and inter-dependencies quickly becomes overwhelming. In this talk Colin Atkinson will present a novel approach for organizing and generating the different views used in advanced software engineering methods referred to as Orthographic Software Modeling (OSM). This provides a simple metaphor for integrating different development paradigms and for leveraging domain specific languages in software engineering. Development environments that support OSM essentially raise the level of abstraction at which developers interact with their tools by hiding the idiosyncrasies of specific editors, storage choices and artifact organization policies. The overall benefit is to make it easier for developers to use advanced software engineering methods.

Bio: Colin Atkinson has been the leader of the Software Engineering Group at the University of Mannheim since April 2003. Before that he was a professor at the University of Kaiserslautern and project leader at the affiliated Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering. From 1991 until 1997 he was an Assistant Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Houston – Clear Lake. He received a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in computer science from Imperial College, London, in 1990 and 1985 respectively, and received his B.Sc. in Mathematical Physics from the University of Nottingham in 1983. His research interests focus on the use of model-driven and component based approaches in the development of dependable computing systems.