CfP: 3rd International Workshop on Socio-Technical Congruence (STC 2010)

3rd International Workshop on Socio-Technical Congruence. ICSE 2010, May 4th, Cape Town, South Africa. Following up on the success of the first two iterations of the workshop, the third instance of the STC workshop will be held in conjunction with ICSE 2010. Important Dates Paper submission deadline: 1 February 2010 Notification to authors: 8 March 2010 Final papers due: 5 April 2010 Background Software engineering has long been recognized as a human activity with significant communication, coordination and collaborative needs. Socio-technical congruence is broadly defined as the match between the coordination requirements established by the dependencies among tasks and the actual coordination activities carried out by the workers. The concept of congruence has been previously suggested as an important concept in system and organizational design [1, 4]. However, new approaches to congruence introduces a new way of thinking about coordination and communication among interdependent development teams by focusing on a fine-grain level of analysis of different types of product dependencies [2, 3, 5]. Promising results have been reported in terms of the impact of congruence on development productivity [3] as well as approaches for analyzing the implications of congruence [5]. The first two instance of this workshop, STC 2008/2009, provided a fruitful environment for discussion of open research questions in the area of congruence and future directions. Workshop participants presented a collection of innovative ideas in terms of measurement of congruence, data analysis methods, approaches to examine the implications of congruence or the lack of it as well as case studies of socio-technical congruence at play in different organizational settings. Despite the valuable contributions of our past workshops, there is a clear need to further developments and a third instance of the STC workshop represents an important step forward. For instance, new measurement approaches of congruence are needed, particularly, those capable of capturing relevant technical dependencies at different stages of the development process such as architectural design, detailed design and implementation. A deeper analysis of the implications of socio-technical congruence at different levels of analysis and across different organization settings (e.g. open source and distributed development) is required. In addition, the development of mechanisms for assessing and utilizing congruence measures to improve software design and development through novel tools, processes and practices Workshop Theme The topics of interest for STC 2010 include, but are not limited to: ·      Definitions of coordination and congruence in the context of software engineering and their relationship to dependencies ·      Examining the relationship between different types of dependencies, coordination capabilities and actual coordination activities ·      Examining the range of problems in software development organizations that can be thought as coordination problems ·      Measuring congruence in different types of software projects ·      Comparative analysis of factors influencing congruence in different organizational settings such as open source, outsourcing, global distribution. ·      Assessing the impact of development practices on congruence ·      Approaches to assess and maintain congruence across the entire software development life cycle ·      Architectural and organizational tactics for achieving better congruence ·      Variation in the type and nature of coordination required when developing in different architectural styles ·      Analytical techniques for identifying patterns of technical dependency requiring coordination ·      Tools for assessing and visualizing congruence at the individual, group or organizational level ·      Analytical techniques and tools for extracting congruence from historical data repositories. Workshop Goals The third instance of the STC workshop has the following several overlapping goals: ·      Start addressing the research topics outlined above. ·      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. Workshop Organizers Marcelo Cataldo, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, mcataldo@andrew.cmu.edu Daniela Damian, University of Victoria, Canada, danielad@cs.uvic.ca Premkumar Devanbu, University of California, Davis, USA, Devanbu@cs.ucdavis.edu Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto, Canada, sme@cs.toronto.edu James Herbsleb, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, jdh@cs.cmu.edu Audris Mockus, Avaya Labs Research, USA, audris@avaya.com Program Committee Leonard Bass, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, ljb@sei.cmu.edu Matthew Bass, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, mbass@cmu.edu Andrew Begel, Microsoft Research, USA, andrew.begel@microsoft.com Yuanfang Cai, Drexel University, USA, yfcai@cs.drexel.edu 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 Anita Sarma, University of Nebraska, USA, asarma@cse.unl.edu Giuseppe Valetto, Drexel University, USA, valetto@cs.drexel.edu Patrick Wagstrom, IBM TJ Watson, USA, pwagstro@us.ibm.com Clay Williams, IBM TJ Watson, USA, clayw@us.ibm.com 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 2010 submission template. Submissions are being handled online by EasyChair: STC 2010 submission web site (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=stc2010)