Quick links:

1. Overview
2. Submissions details
3. Important dates
4. FAQ

Overview

In order to encourage collaboration and coordination between presentations, VISSOFT 2007 will host a tool demo challenge. The VISSOFT Tool Demo Challenge brings together researchers who are interested in applying, comparing, and challenging their visualization tools and approaches on two common open source projects:

1. Azureus: a BitTorrent client written in Java. It is composed of 4222 classes and more than 300,000 lines of code.
   
2. GCC: the GNU Compiler Collection including front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as libraries for these languages. The core of GCC is written in c and has 1,000,000 lines of code, while the libraries include 800,000 lines of ADA code, 80,000 lines of c++ code and 1,500,000 of java code.

Participating to the challenge is straightforward:

1. Select your project
2. Select your research area and formulate your research questions (see the areas below)
3. Get the available project data (see the data sets below)
4. Use your tool(s) to answer your research questions
5. Write up and submit your challenge report

Note that it is possible to submit both a tool demo and a challenge report. See details in the FAQ section.

Research Questions Areas

Here we list some possible research areas. You are not forced to use this list while formulating your research questions, i.e. fill free to add other areas. In this case it would be nice if you send us the proposed area before submitting, so that we can update the list.

1. Architecture analysis
   • Architecture recovery
   • Module / component dependencies
2. Developers
   • Developer-team assessment
   • Developers responsibilities / expertises detection
   • Social network analysis
3. Source code analysis
   • Refactoring detection
   • Design pattern and anti pattern detection
   • Cross cutting concerns detection
   • Bad smells (God classes, brain classes etc.) / candidates for reengineering detection
   • Semantic indexing / analysis
4. Software Evolution Analysis
• Architecture evolution and decay
• Trend analysis and prediction
• Phase detection (bug fixing, restructuring, features addition etc.)
• Evolutionary coupling analysis
• Change impact analysis

Data Sets

Note that this data does not have to be used: If your tool is based on different data feel free to use it.
In this case you can access the repository at:

• Azureus: :pserver:anonymous@azureus.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/azureus (more information here)
• GCC: svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/trunk (more information here)

Challenge report

The challenge report describes the results of your work. The report should cover the following aspects: Questions addressed, input data, approach and tools used, derived results and interpretation of them, and conclusions. Reports should be at most 2 pages long and in the proceedings format. Each challenge report will undergo a thorough review. Accepted reports will be published in the proceedings.
Challenge report submissions are due to Monday, April 9th.

Awarding

The best n challenge reports (where 1 <= n <= 3, according to the number of submissions) will be awarded. The evaluation will be based on both the challenge report and the live demo (presentation).

Presentation

Authors of accepted tool demos and challenge reports will be invited to give a presentation at the VISSOFT Tool Demo Session, which will be colocated with the ICPC Tool Demo Session.
The presentation will consist in a live demo of the tool, and for challenge report, a summary of the results obtained on the target system.

Submission Details

Challenge report submissions are through the Submission page by selecting "Competition" for Paper Category (in the Author Registration page).

Important Dates

Challenge reports due: Monday, April 9th, 2007 (Apia Time)
Author Notifications: Friday, April 20th, 2007
Camera-ready version due: Monday, April 30th, 2007

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the difference between a tool demo and a challenge report?
  The tool demo is a general description of your visualization tool and of how it can support software understanding activities.
  The challenge report should describe how you applied your visualization tool to one of the target systems, which research questions you address and which results you obtain.

• Is it possible to submit both a tool demo and a challenge report?
  It is possible, as long as they conform to the differences explained in the previous question.

• Is it necessary to analyze the entire system?
  No, you can also focus on one part of the system only, e.g. one (or more) Azureus package, the GCC core, one (or more) GCC library.

• What are FAMIX, XMI and MSE?
  FAMIX is an entity-relationship model that models object oriented source code. XMI is a Metadata Interchange format based on XML. MSE is another interchange file format.
  More information about FAMIX and XMI is available here, while the description of MSE can be found here.

If you have other questions just send an email to: marco dot dambros at lu dot unisi dot ch.