Background and Goals
ENASE provides a yearly forum for researchers and practitioners to review and evaluate new software development methodologies, practices, architectures, technologies and tools. The background body of knowledge for ENASE are novel approaches to software engineering with emphasis on software product and process improvement. Against that background, ENASE undertakes to provide fast but careful empirical evaluation of such approaches as agile software development, aspect-oriented software development, model driven engineering, component software, service-oriented architectures, evolutionary design, intentional software, example centric programming, language workbenches, agent-oriented software engineering, etc.
An important underpinning and assumption of ENASE is that in software engineering "novel" turns out frequently to be just new hype. An objective of ENASE is to reveal any such hype as soon as feasible. This means that ENASE does not exclude more traditional approaches to software development and integration. On the contrary, ENASE endeavors to compare novel with traditional, also to discover if novel is not just traditional in disguise.
Motivation
Many software projects fail to meet their initial objectives. The reality of software production is plagued by exceeded deadlines and budgets, faulty solutions, unsustainable systems, cancelled projects, etc.. The paramount questions are: What causes software projects to fail? What are the symptoms of project problems and how to address them? How to model, design and program successful system solutions? How to construct and integrate systems so that they are supportable (i.e. understandable, maintainable and scalable)?
Today's enterprise information systems are rarely developed in-house from scratch. Most systems are the results of evolutionary maintenance of existing systems. Occasionally new applications and systems are developed, but practically always with the intent to integrate them with existing software. New technologies emerge to facilitate development and integration of enterprise systems. Assistance comes from component technology standards, such as J2EE/EJB, and .NET. A related technology of web services advocates constructing systems from services, i.e. running software instances (as opposed to components, which are units of composition with contractually specified interfaces and which need to be loaded, installed, composed, deployed and initialized before they can be run).
The main motivation for the ENASE workshops is to explain fundamental conditions for achieving (developing and integrating) supportable enterprise and business-to-business information systems. The workshops concentrate on software product and process improvement, architectural design, engineering principles, and organizational approaches for developing supportable systems. A supportable system delivers desired functionality and satisfies other system qualities with understandable, maintainable and scalable design. The complexity of modern systems is "in the wires" rather than in the mere size of the code. Accordingly, the necessary condition of supportability is the minimization of dependencies between code elements (subsystems, services, components, objects, methods).
The workshops will propose how to harness the complexity of large software models, manage large system production, ensure supportable architectural design, use metrics to improve software products and to measure supportability, take advantage of design and integration patterns and frameworks, use intentional and example centric programming, manage forward and reverse-engineering cycles, etc. so that a measurably-supportable system can result.