[Om-announce] TOPI 2013: 3rd Workshop on Developing Tools as Plug-ins

[Martin Nordio]

Call for participation
TOPI 2013: 3rd Workshop on Developing Tools as Plug-ins
San Francisco, May 21st, 2013
ICSE 2013 Workshop
Web: http://se.inf.ethz.ch/events/topi2013/

Keynote: 
	Dustin Campbell (Microsoft)
	Project Roslyn: Exposing the C# and VB compilers’ code analysis

Program:
	Available at: http://se.inf.ethz.ch/events/topi2013/Program.html

OVERVIEW
Our knowledge as to how to solve software engineering problems is increasingly being encapsulated in tools. These tools are at their best when they operate in a pre-existing development environment. This approach allows integration with existing elements such as compilers, debuggers, profilers, and visualizers as well as numerous other development and, often, runtime tools.

Building tools as 'plug-ins' can be challenging. How do they interact with the core environment? How do they interact with one another, especially since each developer may choose a different set of plug-ins. How can we share tools across different and future core development environments? This workshop is intended for all those interested in developing tools as plug-ins for IDEs, middle-wares and browsers.

We are looking for position papers spotting the medium and long term challenges of developing tools as plug-ins as well as research contributions identifying recent successful tools as plug-ins, characteristics of good plug-ins and reports of the main difficulties in implementing plug-ins in current platforms.

The main focus will be on fostering creative discussion between the participants, on specific themes. We will examine the categories of problems that are best solved using plug-ins and look at key challenges. TOPI 2013 will be organized in conjunction with ICSE 2013.

TOPICS
The workshop aims to address the following issues:
	* identify recent successful tools as plug-ins 
	* categorize the characteristics of good plug-ins 
	* understand interoperability requirements to making tools available across platforms 
	* list which tools lend themselves best to the plug-in approach 
	* specify the medium and long term challenges of tools as plug-ins

Thus, we are more concerned in this workshop with understanding the characteristics and creation of tools as plug-ins, than of the tools themselves. 
Tools can come from many areas. Examples would be:
	* Computer supported cooperative work
	* Empirical software engineering
	* Engineering secure software
	* Mining software repositories
	* Programming languages and design
	* Software dependability, safety, and reliability
	* Software engineering education
	* Software processes
	* Software requirements engineering
	* Software testing and analysis
	* Software verification
	* Software debugging, software profiling 
	* Static/Dynamic analysis and bug-finding