Workshop on Robustness against External Changes (WoREC) 2017

Call for Submissions

More and more do even small software systems rely on one or several external services (not under the control of the same team or even organization). Historically, these services would often be interacted with via web-scraping techniques, which are naturally very fragile. Recently, APIs based on (typically) HTTP and JSON are becoming more and more common, but are often defined very informally (with little or no explicit documentation) and change frequently and without announcement.

As a result, the consuming system will often break at unexpected times and in surprising ways and no amount of testing can avoid this.

This workshop will discuss techniques used by the consumers of such services to make the situation more bearable, for example:

• Programming patterns for increasing robustness
• Heuristic navigation of HATEOAS-type REST services
• Debugging-related design heuristics
• Tools and design rules for robust web scraping
• Patterns of successful interaction with the producers of oft-changing services
• How to promote learning about all of the above within a team

Workshop format

The workshop will use a discussion-heavy format: Two presentations (of 10 minutes each) will be followed by 20 minutes of discussion; plus a break after every two such packs (every 80 minutes).

Important Dates

Submission: 2017-03-31.
Notification of acceptance: 2017-04-15.
Workshop: 2017-06-16.

Submission Process

Submit papers of up to 6 pages length, in IEEE conference format, as PDF. If you are a practitioner, you may also submit merely an outline of your presentation (of around 500 words) in no particular formatting or a slide deck (30 slides maximum).

Submit via Easychair.

Location

The workshop will be held at Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Informatik, Takustr. 9, 14195 Berlin, Germany.

Take subway line U3 to Dahlem Dorf, then 400m on foot.

Organizers

Lutz Prechelt, prechelt@inf.fu-berlin.de