Report on the second ACM workshop on hot topics in software upgrades (HotSWUp'09)

Abstract

The Second ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades (HotSWUp'09) was held on 25 October 2009 in Orlando, FL. The workshop was co-located with OOPSLA 2009 and was sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN. Twenty researchers and practitioners, from the programming languages, systems, software engineering and database communities, attended HotSWUp'09. The goal of HotSWUp is to identify, through interdisciplinary collaboration, cutting-edge research ideas for implementing software upgrades. The workshop combined presentations of peer-reviewed research papers with invited presentations from well-known experts and a keynote speech on the practical issues related to performing large-scale upgrades. The audience included researchers and practitioners from academia, the industry (Facebook, ABB, Oracle) and the open-source community (AppUpdater). In addition to the technical presentations, the program allowed ample time for discussions, which were driven by debate questions provided in advance by the presenters HotSWUp provides a premier forum for discussing problems that are often considered niche topics in the established research communities. For example, the technical discussions at HotSWUp'09 covered dynamic software updates, package management tools, database schema upgrades, upgrades of systems with real-time constraints, etc., and highlighted many synergies among these topics. Perhaps more interestingly, the industry presentations provided real-world examples of systems that a have strong requirement for online upgrades. These examples emphasized the magnitude of the software upgrade problems that the industry is facing today