In the 21st Century, software is the enabling innovation pillar for all of civilization’s needs – including: food supply, living space (water, waste, power, and climate) management, services (health, financial, transportation, communication) and human relations (social networking). While the professionalism inherent in implement-ing, deploying, and configuring software systems may not appear as advanced as that found in other more regulated professions such as medicine, aviation, and engineering – is it “good enough”? This panel will discuss whether we are learning effectively from our expe­riences with failure and human hazards. Panelists will also discuss how software professionalism can be accelerated and debate the effectiveness of proficiency certifications in fostering increased professionalism.

The implementation and release of software products has progressed from a lengthy delivery cycle - the methodical sequential path of "big bang" waterfall product delivery - to the rapid iterative release cycle supported by agile practices. Recently, "continuous delivery" has emerged as a strategy to accelerate product availability. However, only a systematic automation of the build, test and deployment processes in concert with superbly coordinated teams of software practitioners and business partners makes make this possible. However, trade-offs in the optimization of process may act to limit the innovativeness of product output. This panel will discuss approaches, challenges, risks, and strategies for using continuous delivery to competitive advantage.

Professionalism evolves as knowledge and skills mature from craft to commercial practice - often as the result of learnings derived from failure and human hazard. Aviation, medicine, engineering, and architecture are examples of disciplines with an established knowledge base and curriculum of learning and mentorship. These disciplines often require regulated practices executed by certified professionals to ensure the safety and economic value of delivered services. This panel will debate whether we are learning effectively from our experiences and what might be done to accelerate increased software professionalism and product value.

This year's SPLASH theme is the "Internet as a World-Wide Virtual Machine" to highlight the challenges of continuous system growth, multi-site development, big data, with millions of interacting users and devices. This panel will discuss how refactoring systems can enable them to "go green" by reducing power consumption, increasing simplicity of interface, and/or extending system longevity in a world of constantly changing technology.

Declarative approaches have been proposed to counter the limited exibility of the imperative modeling paradigm, but little empir- ical insights are available into their actual strengths and use. Our pre- vious work has shown that end-users can eectively model and execute a declarative process with a considerable spectrum of constraints. How- ever, what is still unclear is how eectively end-users are able to handle unforeseen events that can occur during run-time. This paper describes the design, execution, and results of a controlled experiment in which subjects have to execute a process with varying levels of events. The results suggest that our subjects, while being able to eectively handle constraints, have diculties to handle unforeseen events during run-time. This outcome supports the argument that declarative processes require more experienced people, especially when dealing with unforeseen events.

The need for more flexibility of process-aware information systems (PAISs) has been discussed for several years and different approaches for adaptive process management have emerged. However, only few of them provide support for both changes of individual process instances and the propagation of process type changes to a collection of related process instances. Furthermore, knowledge about process changes has not yet been exploited by any of these systems. This paper presents the ProCycle approach which overcomes this practical limitation by capturing the whole process life cycle and all kinds of changes in an integrated way. Users are not only allowed to deviate from the predefined process in exceptional situations, but are also assisted in retrieving and reusing knowledge about previously performed changes in this context. If similar instance deviations occur frequently, process engineers will be supported in deriving improved process models from them. This, in turn, allows engineers to evolve the PAIS (including the knowledge about the changes) over time. Feasability of the ProCycle approach is demonstrated by a proof-of-concept prototype which combines adaptive process management technology with concepts and methods provided by case-based reasoning (CBR) technology.

Alaska Simulator is an interactive software tool developed at the University of Innsbruck which allows people to explore different approaches to process flexibility by using a familiar metaphor, i.e., travel planning and execution. In addition, Alaska Simulator is used for studying research questions in the context of business process management and other related fields. For this, Alaska Simulator provides integrated support of different approaches to process flexibility in terms of decision deferral patterns, which all allow interleaving process modeling with execution and provide mechanisms for effectively dealing with uncertainty. The biggest challenge for users of such flexible systems is to find the right balance between pre-planning activities and keeping options open. To address this challenge Alaska Simulator allows safe exploration and systematic investigation of how much pre-modeling is needed under different circumstances.

Declarative approaches have been proposed to counter the limited flexibility of the traditional imperative modeling paradigm, but little empirical insights are available into their actual strengths and usage. In particular, it is unclear whether end-users are really capable of adjusting a particular plan to execute a business process when using a declarative approach. Our paper addresses this knowledge gap by describing the design, execution, and results of a controlled experiment in which varying levels of constraints are imposed on the way a group of subjects can execute a process. The results suggest that our subjects can effectively deal with increased levels of constraints when relying on a declarative approach. This outcome supports the viability of this approach, justifying its further development and application.

The need for more flexiblity of process-aware information systems (PAIS) has been discussed for several years and different approaches for adaptive process management have emerged. Only few of them provide support for both changes of individual process instances and the propagation of process type changes to a collection of related process instances. The knowledge about changes has not yet been exploited by any of these systems. To overcome this practical limitation, PAIS must capture the whole process life cycle and all kinds of changes in an integrated way. They must allow users to deviate from the predefined process in exceptional situations, and assist them in retrieving and reusing knowledge about previously performed changes. In this report we present a proof-of concept implementation of a learning adaptive PAIS. The prototype combines the ADEPT2 framework for dynamic process changes with concepts and methods provided by case-based reasoning(CBR) technology.

Culture offers both local and global challenges to software teams as they collaborate to understand requirements, build systems, and deliver product. Agile software practices through iteration, incremental delivery, and customer proximity can ameliorate cultural challenges to create synergies. Alternatively, some cultural barriers may prove insurmountable. This panel brings together community experts to share and discuss research and field experience.

Our workshop provides a platform to share experiences, exchange success stories and discuss potential pitfalls when using Open Source Tools (OST) for Agile Development. The goal of this workshop is to create awareness of useful OST and help to improve one’s portfolio of tools for Agile Development. This ninety-minute workshop is a follow up on the highly successful AOSTA workshops at XP’2006 in Oulu Finland – there were more than 25 participants and a mid-night (!) sun BOF on the same topic attracted more than 10 additional attendees and XP’2007, Como, Italy. We will continue our discussions and share new up-to-date experiences among all new and repeat participants.

Aufgrund haufiger Anderungen in ihrem Geschaftsumfeld mussen Unternehmen in der Lage sein, ihre Geschaftsprozesse und die sie unterstutzenden Informationssysteme (IS) rasch und flexibel anzupassen. In jungerer Vergangenheit ist eine neue Generation von IS entstanden, die eine umfassende IT-Unterstutzung fur Prozesse zum Ziel haben. Diese Systeme haben sich jedoch in der Praxis oftmals als zu starr erwiesen. Um wirklich breit einsetzbar zu sein, muss es auch moglich sein, in Ausnahmefallen flexibel vom definierten Prozess abzuweichen sowie Prozessimplementierungen rasch an sich andernde Rahmenbedingungen, wie beispielsweise neue gesetzliche Anforderungen, anzupassen. Das prozessorientierte IS sollte den Benutzer im Anderungsfall durch die Wiederverwendung von Anderungen unterstutzen sowie den Prozessverantwortlichen bei der Ableitung von verbesserten Prozessmodellen helfen. Dieser Beitrag stellt mit ProCycle einen implementierten Ansatz vor, der all diese Funktionalitaten bietet und der aus der Integration adaptiver Prozess-Management-Technologie mit Techniken des Case-Based Reasoning hervorgegangen ist. Ziel ist es, den kompletten Prozesslebenszyklus in integrierter Form zu unterstutzen.

Today companies are faced with global competition and ever changing customer demands. Thus the success of a company more and more depends on its ability to flexibly and quickly react to changes. In this paper we present the dynamic engines, which allow for the flexible IT support of business processes in highly dynamic environments like the logistics industry, by extracting process logic and business rules from application programs

The success of a company more and more depends on its ability to flexibly and quickly react to changes. Combining process management techniques and conversational case-based reasoning (CCBR) allows for flexibly aligning the business processes to new requirements by providing integrated process life cycle support. This includes the adaptation of business processes to changing needs by allowing deviations from the predefined process model, the memorization and the reuse of these deviations using CCBR, and the derivation of process improvements from cases. However, to effectively support users during the whole process life cycle, the quality of the data maintained in the case base (CB) is essential. Low problem solving efficiency of the CCBR system as well as inconsistent or inaccurate cases can limit user acceptance. In this paper we describe fundamental requirements for CB maintenance, which arise when integrating business process management (BPM) and CCBR and elaborate our approach to meeting these requirements.

In order to support business processes effectively, their implementation by a process management systems (PMS) must be as close to the real world's processes as possible. Generally, it is not sufficient to analyze and model a business process only once, and then to handle respective business cases according to the defined model for a long period of time. Instead, process implementations must be quickly adaptable to changing needs. A PMS should enable process instance changes and provide facilities for analyzing these instance-specific changes in order to derive optimized process models. In this paper we introduce a framework for the agile mining of business processes which supports the whole process life cycle in an integrated way. Our framework is based on process mining techniques, adaptive process management, and conversational case-based reasoning. On the one hand, it allows annotating execution and change logs with semantical information to gather information about the reasons for ad-hoc deviations, which can then be analyzed by the process engineer (with support from the PMS). On the other hand, it enables the process engineer to adapt process models based on the outcome of these analyses and to migrate related process instances to the new model.

Process-aware information systems should enable the flexible alignment of business processes to new requirements by supporting deviations from the predefined process model at runtime. To facilitate such dynamic process changes we have adopted techniques from case-based reasoning (CBR). In particular, our existing approach allows to capture the semantics of ad-hoc changes, to support their memorization, and to enable their reuse in upcoming exceptional situations. To further improve change reuse this paper presents an approach for discovering dependencies between ad-hoc modifications from change history. Based on this information better user assistance can be provided when dynamic process changes have to be made.

Companies are developing a growing interest in aligning their information systems in a process-oriented way. However, current process-aware information systems (PAIS) fail to meet process flexibility requirements, which reduces the applicability of such systems. To overcome this limitation PAIS should capture the whole process life cycle and all kinds of changes in an integrated way. In this paper we present such a holistic approach providing full process life cycle support by combining the ADEPT framework for dynamic process changes with the concepts and methods provided by case-based reasoning (CBR) technology. This allows expressing the semantics of process changes, their memorization and their reuse to perform similar changes in the future. If the same or similar process instance changes occur frequently, potential process type changes are suggested to the process engineer. The process engineer can then perform a schema evolution and migrate running instances to the new schema version by using the ADEPT framework. Finally, the case–base related to the old schema version is migrated as well.

Process-aware information systems (PAIS) allow coordinating the execution of business processes by providing the right tasks to the right people at the right time. In order to support a broad spectrum of business processes, PAIS must be flexible at run-time. Ad-hoc deviations from the predefined process schema as well as the quick adaptation of the process schema itself due to changes of the underlying business processes must be supported. This paper presents an integrated approach combining the concepts and methods provided by the process management systems ADEPT and CBRFlow. Integrating these two systems enables ad-hoc modifications of single process instances, the memorization of these modifications using conversational case-based reasoning, and their reuse in similar future situations. In addition, potential process type changes can be derived from cases when similar ad-hoc modifications at the process instance level occur frequently.

Today's dynamic and uncertain business environment requires quick reaction to change and frequent deviations from plans, making business agility indispensable. Therefore process-based systems must be able to flexibly adapt to change and provide learning capabilities. This paper proposes an approach to achieve agility in workflow management systems based on the integration of workflow management and conversational case-based reasoning. Keeping semantical knowledge about ad-hoc deviations in cases allows starting with a lightweight initial workflow model and fosters learning from living processes to continuously improve workflow execution.