Workshop on Enterprise-Aligned Software Engineering (EASE'12) at International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

Workshop submission deadline: 19 September 2012
Workshop date: 12 November 2012
Co-organizers: Leon J. Osterweil, Peri Tarr, Kevin Sullivan, Evelyn Duesterwald
Enterprises achieve business goals through engineering, delivery and support of software. Business success depends on aligning software processes and their products with business goals. However, achieving this alignment is challenging, as evidenced by decades of software products that do not achieve business goals.
Managing the alignment between enterprises and their software organizations is a long-term, complex activity. It requires surfacing and managing goals, commitments, and forms of risk in software engineering processes in the presence of uncertainty. Solutions must facilitate (a) identification of actions offering the best chances of meeting goals and commitments, (b) assessing progress towards meeting goals and commitments while projects are evolving, (c) prediction, diagnosis, and response to emergent issues, and (d) cross-organizational coordination to achieve goals, remediate problems, and produce the best results globally.
The goal of the EASE 2012 workshop is to identify and address key issues that arise in aligning software engineering approaches and objectives with the objectives of the businesses and enterprises that produce and/or and use large-scale software systems. It provides a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss key issues, impediments and usage scenarios in different contexts, including commercial, government, open source, and international.
The workshop will be a very interactive working session, with a few presentations and much discussion. See the CFP (https://laser.cs.umass.edu/EASE12/) for details.
Prospective workshop participants are encouraged to submit 1-4 page position statements or short papers. We particularly encourage novel and/or controversial positions. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
  * Quantifying and measuring the alignment between software engineering and business goals.
  * Software processes that incorporate stakeholders beyond the development group.
  * Understanding and responding to pervasive evolutionary pressures on software.
  * Organizational and social factors in achieving the alignment, including effects of organizational maturity.
  * Mathematical and statistical approaches to modeling, prediction and optimization in the presence of uncertainty.
  * Coordination and collaboration aspects of achieving alignment between business goals and software engineering.
  * Data modeling and collection issues to enable effective collection and analytics.
  * Empirical methods for understanding the alignment, identifying appropriate measures, finding common “patterns”, mining historical information, etc.
  * Usability and human factors issues, processes, skills, etc.
  * The enterprise “gaps”: insight into particular issues that practitioners face in achieving alignment between business goals and software engineering.
  * Novel approaches to analysis, design, implementation, operation, assessment and evolution of socio-technical systems.