Krzysztof Czarnecki, ECE, University of Waterloo

Krzysztof Czarnecki is an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Before coming to Waterloo, he spent eight years at DaimlerChrysler Research working on the practical applications of generative programming.

He is co-author of the book "Generative Programming" (Addison-Wesley, 2000), which is regarded as founding work of the area and is used as a graduate text at universities around the world. He was a keynote speaker the 2006 International Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE) and will be the program chair for MoDELS 2008.

His current work focuses on realizing the synergies between generative and model-driven software development.

Presentation: "Variability (and) Modeling"

Track: Architecture Quality (day 1)

Time: Tuesday 15:40 - 16:40

Location: Conference Hall

Abstract:

Domain-specific platforms (DSPs), such as SAP/R3 or IBM's WebSphere Commerce, improve productivity, time-to-market, and quality of application development by leveraging the commonalities of applications within an application domain. One of the key challenges with today's DSPs is the so-called "customization cliff", which refers to the situation that customization beyond the settings offered by simple configuration facilities such as wizards usually requires custom coding.

Model-driven software development has the potential to eliminate the customization cliff in traditional, code-centric DSPs by offering multi-level modeling and customization of each level as a middle ground between wizards and custom coding.

In this talk, after explaining some basic concepts of multi-level modeling, I will provide a classification of different customization techniques such as protected regions and round-trip engineering, and discuss their tradeoffs. I will also report on some recent progress in achieving round-trip engineering between models expressed in domain-specific languages and code.

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