Guided largely by the principle of separation of concerns, most software designers today make their design decisions in an economics-independent "Flatland," where the focus is on structure and semantics, not value added. While software contributed primarily to off-line, backroom activities, designing in economics-independent Flatland was not particularly harmful. That is no longer the case. Software design decisions are now intimately coupled with fundamental business, public service, and other decisions in almost every field of endeavor. It is therefore now critical to understand how software design decisions in a given context relate to value creation. Context matters because it determines what is valued and by whom; but the logic of good design is one of value creation independent of context.
World-wide annual expenditures on software are now estimated at US$800 billion. Advances that permitted even incrementally better software design investment decision making could produce tens of billions of dollars in added value. Yet today we still lack basic concepts, models, methods, and tools for reasoning about software design issues in sophisticated economic terms EDSER-2 will be a follow-on to the highly productive EDSER-1 (click here), held at ICSE in 1999 in trying to lay the groundwork for research that leads to advances in this area. The second workshop will focus on issues raised at the first one, with an increasing emphasis on how to move from the formulation of descriptive theories to economically founded prescriptive guidelines.
Position papers in any of the following broad research problem areas are sought.
Participation is by invitation on the basis of a submitted paper of 3-5 pages. As stipulated by the ICSE workshop co-chairs, the submission deadline is inflexible. We are obliged to follow these guidelines without exception. For more information on ICSE workshops and on this workshop in particular, check the ICSE'2000 Workshops page (click here).
To submit a position paper, send it by e-mail to the workshop chair, Kevin Sullivan, by the February 25 deadline. The preferred encoding is PDF, but Microsoft Word and postscript are also acceptable.