Nominations

1) [+11-3=8] An Exploratory Study of the Design Impact of Language Features for Aspect-oriented Interfaces

It has two As and a B. I really enjoyed the paper. It is thorough and the tools will be a great resource for the community.

Rigorous evaluation of aspect-oriented language features are important and generally lacking. Interesting results on change impact which are useful beyond the results for the individual approaches.

I enjoyed reading this paper. It does a rigorous comparative examination of several different language features providing interfaces in the aspect-oriented setting, gathers metrics, and compares the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. The paper will serve as a guide for future language designers as well as a great example of language design evaluation research.

paper 1 has been discussed quite controversially in the last two years, in several conferences. The current version of paper 1 is good, but I would not recommend it as best paper.

A key problem is really that the authors created most of the programs they compare by themselves and also based on programs written using other mechanisms. There is a lot of space for (unintended) bias here.

2) [+4-3=1] Intraprocedural Dataflow Analysis for Software Product Lines

it is one of those papers that just come at the right time. SPLs have always had this myth that they are much harder to analyze than usual programs, even justifying an entire new field of research. This paper shows that this is not really true, that through a careful choice of abstractions, SPLs can be analyzed almost as easily as usual programs. The paper is extremely well written and thus very instructive, and will be a good foundation for others to build on.

Analysis of SPLs is an interesting topic, clearly of more general interest than AOSD. Interesting technique of automatic lifting of lattices for the “transformation” an existing analysis into one for SPLs (features defined in terms of ifdef conditional compilation).

This is really not a good paper for the award, since it is rather incremental work that is just done very well. I believe that the award should go to a more forward looking paper.

3) [+13-1=12] A Complete Debugger for Aspect-Oriented Programming

Debugging AO programs is hard, and there has not been much work on supporting this debugging process. The chosen design in this paper is a big step forward, and the paper appears very well written. I encourage more research in this direction, and therefore propose this paper.

By going through the contributions of the three papers, this is the one that has promoted, IMO, the biggest contribution shift w.r.t. state-of-the-art. The technical problem (the authors are addressing in this paper) is also much more challenging than the other 2 cases.

Debugging is indeed an important activity that has not been supported well in the past.