ICSE 2008 Workshop, May 10, Leipzig Germany.
The full set of papers is now available (zip file of pdfs) at this link. Please read them before the workshop! (We won't be handing out paper copies at the workshop, so if you would like paper copies, please print them before the workshop.)
Conway claimed that product structure resembles the structure of the organization that designed it [1]. Modular product structure [6] has long remained the primary tactic for managing technical dependencies in software. Today, project coordination is increasingly difficult because of factors such as global distribution of projects, and increasing scale.
We need new and more effective approaches to technical coordination. One of the most promising is socio-technical congruence. 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 STC workshop will share approaches and results, fostering a research community spanning areas as diverse as software architecture and organizational behavior. An interdisciplinary approach is required in order to develop and validate theories that explain the complex and dynamic interactions between organizations and software.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to
We have several overlapping goals for 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., [2-5].
We will spend the majority of time in the workshop in discussion of key issues and ideas. We plan to use a format that has worked well in the past in other discussion-oriented venues.
The basic format will be 3 main paper presentations, with each presenter given 30 minutes. The presenters were selected from the submissions, based on the potential of the paper to raise fundamental issues of wide interest to the audience. Each paper has been assigned a discussant, who will be given 15 minutes to comment on the paper, related research, and research questions. The floor will then be opened up for general discussion.
In addition to the primary paper-discussant-open discussion format, some time will be reserved for two other activities. One is a 4-minute madness sessions where each attendee will be given 4 minutes to identify his/her major research interests, and issues and topics they would be interested in talking with others about offline. The purpose of this is to give everyone enough information to make good use of free time such as breaks and lunch for creating informal ties and to identify possible collaborators. The second activity is a session at the end, for wrapping up, identifying themes, and proposing ideas that we hope will form the kernel of a research agenda in this area.
Program details
Marcelo Cataldo, Carnegie Mellon University and Bosch 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.
James Herbsleb
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/
jdh@cs.cmu.edu
+1 412 268 8933 (ph)
+1 412 268 7287 (fax)
Leonard Bass, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, ljb@sei.cmu.edu
Matthew Bass, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, mtb@sei.cmu.edu
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
Irwin Kwan, University of Victoria, irwink@cs.uvic.ca
Gail Murphy, University of British Columbia, Canada, murphy@cs.ubc.ca
Anita Sarma, University of California, Irvine, USA, asarma@ics.uci.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
Volker Wulf, Universitat Siegen, Germany, volker.wulf@uni-siegen.de
Paper submission deadline: 3 March 2008
Notification to authors: 31 March 2008
Final papers due: 21 April 2008
[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] 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.
[4] 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
[5] 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.
[6] D.L. Parnas, "On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules, Comm. ACM, Vol. 15, No. 12, 192, pp. 1053-1058.