Call for Papers 

European Workshop on "Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing in Software Development Teams (SofTEAM’09)"

http://www1.in.tum.de/softeam09

In Conjunction with SE09, Kaiserslautern, Germany, March 2nd

Submissions deadline 20th December 2008

MOTIVATION

“These are indeed interesting times. The challenges of software development are certainly not going to go away, for we as an industry are continually being driven to do more with less. Methods and processes help; so do languages, frameworks, and tools. However, software development is ultimately a human endeavor, and as such it's ultimately the efforts of the software development team that enable us to deliver quality systems in a predictable and sustainable fashion.” (Booch, 1999)

Almost ten years after Booch emphasized the importance of development team productivity, the underlying research topics are only slowly becoming part of mainstream Software Engineering. Research on software development teams requires interdisciplinary approaches to study the interplay of technologies, tools, processes and human factors appropriately. Although the body of research is growing, it is often scattered across different communities such as Software Engineering, Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and Knowledge Management.
On the other hand, the trend towards distributed software development – which comes in different flavours such as off-shore- and near-shore development, Open Source communities and inter-organizational project teams – presses researchers to deliver results which help to improve the efficiency of development teams.
In the past, research and practice have often taken different directions – research targeting fancy prototypes, while practitioners adopted pragmatic solutions such as instant messaging, Wikis or agile methodologies to increase team productivity. While such hands-on solutions worked quite well for many teams, they lack scientific backing and guidance and have problems to scale up in large and complex project settings. Thus, solutions are sought which embed development methodologies, lightweight approaches for collaboration and knowledge sharing into software development work processes. An example for such an effort is the IBM Jazz platform [Cheng et al. 2004], which intends to seamlessly integrate common collaboration features into IDEs. Thereby, open development platforms such as Eclipse make it easier to transfer research into practice (e.g. the Eclipse mylyn project [Kersten and Murphy 2006]).

TOPICS OF INTEREST

In this workshop we would like to bring together researchers and practitioners working on different aspects of collaboration and knowledge sharing in software development to discuss new results and future research challenges. Major topics addressed at the workshop include (but are not limited to):

• Collaboration and knowledge sharing in development teams and communities.
• Lightweight and unobtrusive tools, Web 2.0 and Social Semantic Web applications, supporting development teams.
• Concerns of individual developers in collaboration settings, such as learning, personal productivity, usability and incentives.
• Approaches and tools for context-aware development and collaboration environments.
• Assistance and recommendation tools based on team experience.
• Research methods and approaches for analyzing and designing successful collaboration support.
• Empirical studies on collaboration and information behavior in development teams.
• Scientific analysis of the relation between methods/processes, tools and collaborative development practice.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Andreas Abecker, FZI Karlsruhe
Lilith Al-Jadiri, T-Systems
Bernd Bruegge, TU Muenchen
Björn Decker, Empolis GmbH
Robert DeLine, Microsoft Research
Paul Grünbacher, Johannes Kepler University Hans-Joerg Happel, FZI Karlsruhe Wolfgang Kaltz, Die Schweizerische Post Steffen Lohmann, University of Duisburg-Essen Walid Maalej, TU München Karsten Nebe, University of Paderborn Jasminko Novak, University of Zurich Barbara Paech, University of Heidelberg Dirk Riehle, SAP Research Hans Schlichter, TU München Janice Singer, National Research Council Canada Anil Kumar Thurimella, Harman/Becker Automotive Systems GmbH Denny Vrandecic, University of Karlsruhe (TH) Jürgen Ziegler, University of Duisburg-Essen Thomas Zimmermann, University of Calgary

ORGANIZERS

Hans-Joerg Happel, FZI Karlsruhe
Steffen Lohmann, University of Duisburg-Essen Walid Maalej, TU München

CONTACT

softeam09-org@fzi.de

http://www1.in.tum.de/softeam09

DEADLINE

• 20th December: Paper submission
• 17th January: Author's notification
• 31th January: Camera-ready version
• 2nd March: Workshop

SUBMISSION

Position, tool-demonstration and experience papers (max 10 pages) are equally welcome for the workshop. They can be submitted via the workshop website (http://www1.in.tum.de/softeam09). Accepted contributions will be published in the GI-Edition „Lecture Notes in Informatics".

Papers must follow the instructions and templates provided at

http://www.gi-ev.de/service/publikationen/lni/

At least one author should participate in the workshop and register for the SE2009 conference.