Submission deadline: 19 September 2012
Submission web site: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ease20120
Keynote speaker: Dr. Dieter Rombach, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany

A very significant trend in enterprises for the past several years has been towards quantifying the benefits provided, and the risk posed, by software engineering and delivery. The goal is to ensure that enterprises invest in those software projects that are most likely to help them achieve their business goals.This is not a passing trend; it reflects how organizations have always done business, but they have not been able to do so effectively with software.

The primary goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss and plan a high-quality research agenda on managing the alignment of enterprise business goals with enterprise software engineering. The success of this area requires researchers and practitioners with a wide variety of expertise, who do not often gather in the same places. These include software process, software metrics, business administration, empirical research, mathematics and statistics, usability, and collaboration.

As an important initial step in defining a high-quality research agenda, a key goal for this first workshop will be to produce a set of “user stories” for this domain, which will clearly identify a first set of critical problems and issues to be tackled as part of a research agenda. Potential solution approaches will also be considered and evaluated during the workshop, as time permits, and subsequently.

An additional goal is to begin building a community among of researchers and practitioners around this problem. We expect this cross-disciplinary community to comprise both members of the software engineering community who normally attend FSE, as well as members of other communities whose expertise will be key to success.

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 and commitments.
• Software processes that incorporate stakeholders beyond the development group, particularly ones that can operate effectively in the presence of uncertainty.
• Understanding and responding to pervasive evolutionary pressures on software, both while projects are in flight and after delivery.
• Organizational and social factors in achieving, and approaches for accomplishing, the alignment, including effects of organizational maturity.
• Analytics and optimization approaches that provide effective actionable insight to users 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” reflecting common problems, mining historical information, etc.
• Usability and human factors issues in achieving the alignment across organizational boundaries, processes, skills, etc.
• Mathematical and statistical approaches to modeling, prediction and optimization in the presence of uncertainty.
• The enterprise “gaps”: insight into particular issues that practitioners face in achieving alignment between business goals and software engineering and delivery.
• Cyber-social systems technologies to support the evolutionary mapping and coordinated management of technical concerns and related social interdependencies.
• Novel approaches to analysis, design, implementation, operation, assessment and evolution of socio-technical systems we are producing, emphasizing the hybrid human-machine computing aspects of these systems.