SUMMARY Advances in communication devices and technologies are dramatically expanding our communication capabilities and enabling a wide range of multimedia communication applications. The current approach to develop communication‐intensive applications results in products that are fragmented, inflexible, and incapable of responding to changing end‐users' communication needs. These limitations have resulted in the need for a new development approach of building communication applications that are driven by end‐users and that support the dynamic nature of communication‐based collaboration. To address this need, the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) technology has been developed to support rapid specification and automatic realization of user‐centric communication applications based on a domain‐specific modeling approach. The CVM technology consists of a domain‐specific modeling language (DSML), the Communication Modeling Language (CML), that is used to create communication models, and a semantic rich platform, the CVM, that realized the created communication models. In this paper, we report on our experiences of applying a systematic approach to engineering CML and the synthesis of CML models in CVM. Based on a feature model describing the taxonomy of the user‐centric communication domain in a network independent manner, we develop the meta‐model of CML and its different concrete syntaxes. We also present a behavioral specification (dynamic semantics) of CML that enables the dynamic synthesis of user‐centric communication models into an executable form called communication control script. We validated the CML semantics using Kermeta, a meta‐programming environment for engineering DSMLs, and evaluated the practicality of our approach using a CVM prototype and a set of experiments. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Improving the quality of software developed in the 21st century is one of the major challenges in the software industry. Addressing this problem will require that academic institutions play a key role in training developers to produce high quality software. Unfortunately, students and instructors continue to be frustrated by the lack of support provided when selecting appropriate testing tools and program analyzers to verify programs under development.In this paper we present an approach that integrates the use of software testing tools into programming and software engineering courses. The approach consists of three phases, developing an online repository with learning resources, training instructors in the area of testing techniques and tools, and integrating the use of testing tools into various programming courses. We also present the results of the first instructors' workshop and studies on integrating testing tools into two courses, CS2 and Software Engineering (SE).

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