2nd International Workshop on Socio-Technical Congruence.

ICSE 2009, May 19, Vancouver, Canada.

Following up on last year's success, the second instance of the STC workshop will be held in conjunction with ICSE 2009.

Program

09:00 Welcome and Introductions

09:10 Session 1: STC and SW Architectures
Paper presentation (25 minutes): "Socio-Technical Design Patterns: A Closer Look at the Relationship between Product and Organizational Structures" Cataldo, Nambiar & Herbsleb

Discussant (15 minutes): Peri Tarr
Open-floor discussion (20 minutes)
10:10 Short Paper Presentation (10 minutes): "Architectural Congruence: Toward Exploring the Software Development Process Through an Architectural Perspective" Sarma, Georgas & Herbsleb

10:20 Poster introduction (2 minutes per poster)
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Session 2:
Paper presentation (30 minutes): "Learning in offshore and legacy software projects: How product structure shapes organization" Zhou, Mockus & Weiss

         Discussant (15 minutes): Andy Begel
         Open-floor discussion (25 minutes)
12:10 Short Paper Presentation (10 minutes): "Developer-Specific Awareness of External Changes" Holmes & Walker
12:20 Poster introduction (2 minutes per poster)
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Session 3: A Closer Look at Coordination
         Paper presentation (30 minutes): "Coordination without discussion? Socio-technical congruence and Stigmergy in Free and Open Source Software projects" Bolici, Howison & Crowston

Discussant (15 minutes): Jim Herbsleb
Open-floor discussion (25 minutes)
15:10 Short Paper Presentation (10 minutes): "Providing Context for Coordination Requirements" Valetto
15:20 Short Paper Presentation (10 minutes): "A Weighted Congruence Measure" Irwan, Schroeter & Damian
15:30 Coffee break
16:00 Poster Session
16:45 Wrap up Discussion and Next Steps
17:30 End-of-Workshop

Papers are available here

Background

Past research has argued that modular product structures provide the basic mechanisms for managing technical dependencies in software development [1, 7]. However, recent work has shown project coordination is increasingly difficult because of factors such as global distribution of projects, increasing scale as well as the dynamic nature of technical dependencies in software development [c.f. 3].

New and more effective methods to technical coordination are required and socio-technical congruence represents one of the most promising approaches. The intensity of coordination required among teams varies substantially, driven not only the degree of module coupling, but also by factors such as architectural change and nonfunctional requirements. On the other hand, geographic distribution, domain expertise, cultural and language barriers, and many other factors impact teams' ability to coordinate their technical decisions. Congruence is achieved when coordination capabilities match or exceed coordination required.

The 2009 instance of the STC workshop will continue fostering a research community in this area as well as focus increased attention on critical topics for advancing our understanding on how to measure socio-technical congruence and assess its implications in software development projects.

Workshop theme

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Measuring socio-technical congruence in software projects
Assessing the impact of development practices on congruence
Architectural and organizational tactics for achieving better congruence
Models and techniques for reasoning about tradeoffs between congruence and desirable technical characteristics
Methods for mining congruence data from software repositories

Factors influencing congruence in a variety of organizational forms, such as open source, outsourcing, global distribution
Variation in the type and nature of coordination required when developing in different architectural styles
Application of social network analysis in studying congruence
Analysis techniques for identifying important patterns of technical dependency requiring coordination
Tools for assessing and visualizing the degree of congruence at the individual, group or organizational level
Assessing the impact of different techniques for visualizing congruence to individuals or groups

Workshop goals

We have several overlapping goals for the workshop:

Advance the development of this research area
Exchange ideas on existing and novel analysis methods and tools for using them
Begin to provide practical approaches that industry can use now or in the near future to improve project coordination
Continue to foster an interdisciplinary research community around this important topic
Continue raising awareness of this topic

Relevance of the workshop

The need for coordination among developers, teams, and organizations is one of the fundamental problems of real-world software engineering projects. Technical decisions about the structure of software serve to shape the extent and content of the required coordination, while team structure, social networks, work history, geographic location, and other organizational factors determine coordination capabilities. Finding a match -- so the coordination capabilities between individuals and between teams meet or exceed the coordination required of them -- is a novel and increasingly pressing research question. Finding this match, or congruence, as it is often called, requires progress in many related research areas. See, e.g., [2-6].

Workshop organizers

Marcelo Cataldo, Bosch Corporate Research, USA, marcelo.cataldo@us.bosch.com

Marcelo Cataldo recently graduated from the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. His research interests are in geographically distributed software development and collaborative software engineering. Marcelo's current research effort focuses on the development and empirical evaluation of mechanisms to measure socio-technical congruence and assess its impact on technical work.

Daniela Damian, University of Victoria, Canada, danielad@cs.uvic.ca

Daniela Damian is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Victoria, Canada. Her research focuses on collaboration and coordination aspects of software engineering and as related to requirements engineering, with a special emphasis on global software development. Daniela was the main organizer of ICSE Workshops on Global Software Engineering for three consecutive years (2002-04) and also the PC Co-chair for the 2006 IEEE Conference on Global Software Engineering. She is serving on the Editorial Board of a number of software engineering and human-computer interaction journals, as well as on the PC of several conferences including ICSE and FSE.

Premkumar Devanbu, University of California, Davis, USA, Devanbu@cs.ucdavis.edu

Prem Devanbu is Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis. His recent work has been focused on the analysis of large, longitudinal, multi-dimensional data sets streaming out of open-source projects. He is specifically interested the long-term mutual interaction between software design and social structure. Devanbu was program chair of ACM SIGSOFT 2006, and has served on ICSE and FSE PCs on several occasions. He is also on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto, Canada, sme@cs.toronto.edu

Steve Easterbrook is a Professor of Computer Science at University of Toronto. His research lies at the intersection of formal software systems modeling, and socio-cognitive aspects of team interaction, including topics such as multi-stakeholder requirements negotiation, model management, and reasoning with inconsistent information. He was general chair of the Symposium on Requirements Engineering, RE 01, program chair for the Automated Software Engineering Conference, ASE 06, and Program Coordinator for ICSE 07. He served as workshops chair at RE'05 and ICSE' 2006, and (co-)chaired many workshops at ASE, ICSE, RE, and CASCON.

James Herbsleb, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, jdh@cs.cmu.edu

James Herbsleb is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, whose research interests focus on global software development, open source, and more generally on collaboration and coordination in software projects. He has served on the PC of several conferences, including ICSE and FSE, was co-chair of CSCW 2004, and serves as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.

Audris Mockus, Avaya Labs Research, USA, audris@avaya.com

Audris Mockus is a Research Scientist at Avaya Labs. He conducts research of complex dynamic systems. He designs data mining methods to summarize and augment the system evolution data, interactive visualization techniques to inspect, present, and control the systems, and statistical models and optimization techniques to understand the systems. Audris Mockus was a PC co-chair of the Metrics'2004 and of the Global Software Engineering'07 and served on the PC of several conferences, including ICSE. He has co-organized the workshop on Mining Software Repositories and serves on the editorial board of the TSE and of the Empirical Software Engineering.

Main contact

Marcelo Cataldo

Robert Bosch Corporate Research

http://www.marcelocataldo.net/Home
marcelo.cataldo@us.bosch.com

+1 412 325 6763 (ph)

+1 412 323 9308 (fax)

Program Committee

Leonard Bass, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, ljb@sei.cmu.edu

Matthew Bass, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, mtb@sei.cmu.edu

Andrew Begel, Microsoft Research, USA, andrew.begel@microsoft.com

Yuanfang Cai, Drexel University, USA, yfcai@cs.drexel.edu

Kevin Crowston, Syracuse University, crowston@syr.edu

Cleidson de Souza, Federal University of Par, Brazil, cdesouza@ufpa.br

Kate Ehrlich, IBM TJ Watson, USA, katee@us.ibm.com

Mary Helander, IBM TJ Watson, USA, helandm@us.ibm.com

James Howison, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, jameshow@andrew.cmu.edu

Irwin Kwan, University of Victoria, irwink@cs.uvic.ca

Gail Murphy, University of British Columbia, Canada, murphy@cs.ubc.ca

Anita Sarma, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, antz@cs.cmu.edu

Anand Swaminathan, Emory University, USA, aswamin@emory.edu

Giuseppe Valetto, Drexel University, USA, valetto@cs.drexel.edu

Patrick Wagstrom, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, pwagstro@andrew.cmu.edu

Clay Williams, IBM TJ Watson, USA, clayw@us.ibm.com

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 6 March 2009

Notification to authors: 31 March 2009

Final papers due: 21 April 2009

Submissions

Both research papers (10 page max) and position papers (4 page max) will be accepted. Submissions should be in pdf format, and should use the ICSE 2009 submission template.

Submissions are being handled online by EasyChair:
STC 2009 submission web site

Proceedings

STC 2009 is intended to be primarily a forum for presentation and discussion of new ideas, preliminary results, novel approaches, and new research questions. In order to allow the free flow of ideas without pre-empting any future publications, we do not plan to place papers in the ACM or IEEE digital libraries. All accepted papers will be distributed at the workshop, and those who wish will have their papers made accessible to the public on the workshop web site.

References

[1] Conway, M.E. How Do Committees Invent? Datamation, Vol.14, No. 4, Apr. 1968, pp. 28-31.

[2] Cataldo, M., Wagstrom, P., Herbsleb, J.D., Carley, K. (2006). Identification of coordination requirements: Implications for the design of collaboration and awareness tools. In Proceedings, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Banff Canada, pp. 353-362.

[3] Cataldo, M., Herbsleb, J.D., Carley, K. (2008). Socio-Technical Congruence: A Framework for Assessing the Impact of Technical and Work Dependencies on Software Development Productivity, 2nd Symposium of Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, Kaiserslautern, Germany.

[4] Damian, D., S. Marczak and I. Kwan, Collaboration patterns and the impact of distance on awareness in requirements-centred social networks, in Proc. of IEEE Int. Conf. on Requirements Eng., New Delhi, Oct 2007.

[5] Damian, D., Izquierdo, L., Singer, J. and Kwan, I., Awareness in the wild: why communication breakdowns occur, in Proc. of IEEE Int. Conf. on Global Software Eng., Munich, Aug. 2007, 81-90

[6] Herbsleb, J.D. & Mockus, A. (2003). Formulation and Preliminary Test of an Empirical Theory of Coordination in Software Engineering. In proceedings, ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), Helsinki, Finland, pp. 112-121.

[7] D.L. Parnas, "On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules, Comm. ACM, Vol. 15, No. 12, 192, pp. 1053-1058.