On July 21 1998, I visited Paolo Ciancarini in the Dept. of Computer Science of the University of Bologna. The department is relatively young and has a strong focus on software and systems engineering. During my visit I had a chance to talk to various people in Paolo's group about their research that is mostly situated on the boundary between requirements engineering and software architecture.

I was invited to give a presentation about some recent work on business object facilities (BOFs) that Ernst Ellmer and I have done at University College London. BOFs are software architectures that facilitate the development and execution of objects whose definition directly evolved from a requirements specification in an object-oriented analysis notation, such as the UML. After the presentation I had a chance to talk to Paolo and various researchers and PhD students of his group.

We identified a common interest in using XML, the new WWW mark-up language, for software engineering documents. Paolo is going to give a paper co-authored by Fabio Vitali and Cecilia Mascolo on this year's Z-User meeting in Berlin. The paper discusses how XML can be used to display and exchange Z documents over the Web. Paolo highlighted, that Z is just an example. Fabio is now working on employing XML for UML documents and at UCL we share this interest with Fabio. I took the opportunity to point Fabio to a paper by Suzuki et.al. that has just appeared in the UML '98 proceedings on this very subject.

Paolo and Cecilia work on formal methods for the specification of mobility. I share that interest from a more practical point of view. We discussed mobility of distributed objects in general and in the OMG/Common Object Request Broker Architecture, in particular. We agreed that it would be interesting to investigate the application of the formal models Paolo and Cecilia developed to migration of distributed objects.

Paolo and I then discussed the "Engineering Distributed Objects Workshop (EDO '99)" that Volker Gruhn (Dortmund) and I are organizing. The workshop will also address the intersection between requirements engineering and distributed object architectures. Paolo agreed to join the workshop committee. We also briefly discussed a Dagstuhl seminar on System Integration that Paolo is organizing with Willi Hasselbring (Dortmund) and to which they have invited me.

This was a very useful visit for both me and people at University of Bologna and we look forward to a closer collaboration in the future.