Economic issues--such as scarcity of time, money, and intellectual capital, risk, uncertainty and ambiguity, and the fundamental need for profit-making firms to generate and to capture wealth--are among the most demanding issues that software developers face in practice. Yet, traditional software engineering research has focused primarily on technical excellence in a largely economics-independent context.

This shortfall presents practical and conceptual problems, as well as exciting opportunities to advance software engineering research. For example, software engineers are now often asked to participate in economic justifications of technical design decisions--and managers, to evaluate design proposals--but both are generally poorly equipped for such roles. We need to develop foundations for software engineering that account for the economics-driven contexts in which most software development occurs and that link important technical and economic decision-making criteria.

The goals of this workshop are to raise the visibility of the economic dimension in software engineering, to discuss its aspects, including open problems, and to begin to define an agenda for basic long-term research in this area. Some relevant conceptual work has already been done in other disciplines, such as corporate finance. An interdisciplinary approach that integrates such work with more traditional software engineering appears to promise significant advantages.  This workshop is intended to provide an opportunity to take a fresh look at the foundations of software engineering in light of the central role that economics now plays in most software development.

Workshop Chair: Kevin Sullivan (E-Mail, Web Page), Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia