Thorsten Berger

(Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)

Keynote title: The Virtual Platform: Re-Thinking Variability

Keynote abstract: Effectively realizing software variants is among the fundamental challenges in software engineering — as witnessed by the long tradition of SPLC and related venues. On a high level, two opposing strategies are commonly used to create variants: (i) software clone&own and (ii) software configuration with an integrated platform (a.k.a. software product line). Organizations often start with the former, which is cheap, agile, and supports quick innovation, but leads to redundancies and does not scale. The latter scales by establishing an integrated platform that shares software assets between variants, but requires high up-front investments or risky re-engineering and migration processes. Traditionally, the product-line research community has focused on methods and tools to build product lines from scratch and to improve those that are already well architected. Over the last decade, research on re-engineering clone&own-based variants into product lines became on vogue, recognizing industrial realities and contributing impactful techniques. However, re-engineering is still risky and costly, threatening whole organizations. So, could we somehow combine the benefits of both opposing strategies, allowing organizations to use both at the same time, for software that is far from being well-architected?

In the keynote, I will discuss our research on and around the virtual platform. I will discuss empirical results on the state of adoption of different variability techniques in industry, motivating our work. I will then introduce the virtual platform, which supports truly incremental development of variant-rich systems, exploiting a spectrum between both opposing strategies. I will discuss the high-level ideas, conceptual structures, workflows, tool prototypes, and evaluations. I will then discuss pragmatic tooling and ways to realize core ideas of the virtual platform in mainstream development, supported by IDE plugins and AI-based recommender systems. Along the way, I will discuss impactful related work, including prior clone-management frameworks generalized by the virtual platform. Time permitting, I will discuss the relevance of all those variability techniques for building AI-enabled software systems, as well visions on using AI foundation models to drive variability.

Bio: Thorsten Berger is a Professor in Computer Science at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. His research focuses on automating software engineering for the next generation of intelligent, autonomous, and variant-rich software systems—exploring new ways of software creation, analysis, and evolution. Before coming to Bochum, he was an Associate Professor at the Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, after stations as a postdoctoral researcher in Canada (University of Waterloo) and Denmark (ITU Copenhagen), and as a PhD student until 2013 in Germany (University of Leipzig), supported by a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). He received grants from the Swedish Research Council (competitive early-career grant), the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP), Vinnova Sweden (EU ITEA project), the European Union (H2020 project), as well as other EU and German national (e.g., state-funding for a startup in AI engineering) and local funding sources (e.g., from the German Research Council’s cluster of excellence CASA) and directly from industry. He received a fellowship from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Wallenberg Foundation, one of the highest recognitions for researchers in Sweden. He received best-paper awards at the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN conference on MODULARITY and the 2013 European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR, now IEEE SANER), as well as most influential paper awards at the VaMoS’20 and the VaMoS’23 conferences.
 His service was recognized with distinguished reviewer awards at the A* conferences ASE 2018 and ICSE 2020, and the SPLC 2022 conference.

Jürgen Hamm

(NetApp Germany)

Keynote title : Exploring Collaborative Innovations: Digital Twins and Architectural Challenges

Keynote Abstract: Digital Twins (DTs) offer significant potential for optimizing, analyzing, and adapting complex engineered systems, particularly post-deployment. They leverage historical data and real-time streaming data from sensors to achieve these objectives. As the adoption of DTs grows, ecosystems of digital twins emerge. Multiple DTs may serve different goals, represent various components in an architecture, embody different levels of detail, abstraction, or fidelity, and be applied at both type/aggregate and instance levels. This talk will present how NetApp has been addressing these challenges with its partners, emphasizing the key motivations behind NetApp’s sustained collaboration with Fraunhofer IESE, which focuses on utilizing architecture robust DTs for various architecture-centric engineering objectives, including anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and optimization to address broader business drivers such as financial considerations, time-to-market pressures, and competitive dynamics that shape industry strategies. Attendees will gain insights into how industry-research partnerships can drive technological innovation and address critical quality requirements, including security, scalability, portability, automation, and sustainability.

Bio: Since March 2012, Jürgen Hamm has been holding the position Solutions Architect SAP EMEA at NetApp Germany. In this role, Hamm focuses on consulting customers and partners on IT-infrastructures, network technologies, SAP technologies and virtualization. Hamm builds cross-functional teams to secure the successful execution of SAP-related customer projects in EMEA. Since 2018, Jürgen Hamm is also, Lead Architect NetApp Twin Solution. In this role he is promoting the development of NetApp’s value offering in the Internet of Things (IoT), thus expanding opportunities with new groups of customers and broadening NetApp’s go-to-market. The IoT solution “NetApp Twin Solution” is just one example of multiple solutions and demos that Hamm set up to showcase and proof NetApp’s role in the IoT market. Before joining NetApp, Jürgen Hamm worked as a technical consultant at IT consultancy GOPA. He started his career as SAP technology expert at Novasoft in 1998. Jürgen is a state-certified technician in the field of automation and production engineering.