Abstract. In software product line engineering, core assets are reusable artifacts that are intended to be used by a family of software products in order to improve development productivity and quality of particular software products. In order to support the construction and maintenance of core assets, various modeling methods have been proposed. However, the assessment of these methods is still in an incubation stage. In fact, only several frameworks for comparing and evaluating these methods have been suggested. These mainly refer to lists of criteria whose examination is sometimes subjective and opinion-dependent. In this paper, we call for empirical evaluation of the comprehension and utilization of core assets and report the initial results of a series of studies we performed in this context.

The CAISE conference theme is linked this year with the coming Olympic and Paralympic Games, which bring together athletes from all the continents to celebrate sporting excellence but also human diversity. Diversity is an important concept for modern information systems. Information Systems (IS) are diverse by nature, as well as the processes for constructing such systems, their developers, their users … It is therefore the responsibility of the IS Engineering community to engineer information systems that operate in such diverse world. During the two last decades, essential challenges made their appearance in the area of Information Systems related to engineering, quality and interconnectivity of information systems. The CAiSE’11 Forum is a place within the CAiSE conference for presenting and discussing new ideas and tools related to information systems engineering. Intended to serve as an interactive platform, the forum aims at the presentation of fresh ideas, emerging new topics, controversial positions, as well as demonstration of innovative systems, tools and applications. The Forum session at the CAiSE conference will facilitate the interaction, discussion, and exchange of ideas among presenters and participants. Two types of submissions have been invited to the Forum: (1) Visionary short papers that present innovative research projects, which are still at a relatively early stage and do not necessarily include a full-scale validation. (2) Demo papers describing innovative tools and prototypes that implement the results of research efforts. The tools and prototypes will be presented as demos in the Forum. CAISE’11 Forum has received a record number of 46 submissions from 24