EDSER-1 Call for Papers

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

This shortfall presents real 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 a new 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. We thus seek position papers that explore basic research issues in economics-driven software engineering. Topics could include but are not limited to the following:

differences in the economic contexts across software industry sectors
how tradeoffs are made differently under different economic constraints
case studies of economics and tradeoff policies in particular sectors
economic analyses of traditional software engineering concepts
economic issues in infrastructure protection and information security
where to look for new foundations: concepts, technologies, methods
what disciplines should software engineering researchers study?
what kinds of organizations should be sought out for insight (e.g. management consulting, social economics, market research)?
role of revenue/opportunity-enhancement versus cost/risk-reduction
economics of timing/ordering of design decisions, e.g., time-to-market
economic impediments to transfer of technically excellent research
education to enable software engineers to reason in economic terms
improving understanding between software engineers and management
improving understanding between academic and industrial innovators

ATTENDANCE

Attendance is by invitation on the basis of a 3-5 page position paper (11 or 12 point typeface). Papers must arrive by 9:00 AM EST March 15. Submission is by e-mail in postscript or PDF form only. Each submission must be accompanied by a plain-text message giving the title, abstract, author, and affiliation. Submit papers to the workshop chair, Kevin Sullivan, at sullivan@Virginia.EDU. Notifications of acceptance will be made by March 31.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Kevin Sullivan (Workshop Chair) University of Virginia, USA
David Notkin University of Washington, USA
Alfonso Fuggetta Politecnico di Milano, Italy
John Favaro Intecs Sistemi, S.p.A., Italy

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND

In 1976, Boehm noted that scientific foundations were being developed for parts of software engineering, including "detailed design and coding of systems software by experts in a relatively economics-independent context," but that there were essentially no scientific foundations for "requirements analysis, design, test and maintenance of applications software by technicians in an economics-driven context." The balance today, in terms of attention to the economics-driven context, appears to be similar to what it was over twenty years ago. Yet, the economic dimension is arguably of far greater importance today than it was then. Changes in technology and society that have occurred since the software engineering discipline took its basic form, which have thrust economic issues to the forefront, include the following:

the Cold War ended and government lost its dominant position in the market
the microprocessor, PC, and mass market software revolutions occurred
networking and the Internet have revolutionized the role of computing
software has moved to the center of system design in most sectors
the software element has become a dominant problem for much of industry
the software industry as a whole has become fiercely competitive
critical software-intensive infrastructures are run by profit-making firms
the economics of information security offense and defense changed greatly
commercial-component-based development is now at a demanding premium
outsourcing is an increasingly important software development technique
time-to-market is critical to software enterprises in competitive markets
success demands anticipation & manipulation of technologies and standards
requirements instability is being amplified by unprecedented developments
some traditional software engineering concepts did not pay off as expected
e.g., comprehensive use of formal methods is generally uneconomical
e.g., cost/schedule estimation are still quite unreliable in general
intellectual advances have occurred in economic disciplines, e.g., finance

This workshop is intended to provide an opportunity to take a fresh look at the foundations of software engineering in light of these enormous changes and the central role that economics now plays in most software development.