CFP: Special Issue of Transactions on Software Engineering

> The Socio-Technical Environment: Rethinking Coordination in the
> Software Development Organization of the Future
>
> Guest Editors
> Marcelo Cataldo, Bosch Corporate Research
> Kate Ehrlich, IBM Research
> Audris Mockus, Avaya Labs
>
> Software engineering has long been recognized as a human activity that
> is managed through a system of methods, tools and processes. The
> interaction and dependencies between the product, the work and the
> people doing it represents the socio-technical environment of a
> software
> development project. For instance, socio-technical congruence
> provides a
> theoretical and methodological framework to examine the relationship
> between the technical properties of the software systems and the
> development organization including developers, methods, tools and
> processes. This approach opens up new ways of thinking about
> coordination requirements in development organizations (e.g. use of
> architectural patterns that improve modularization), supporting
> coordination activities (e.g. through processes, collaboration tools
> or
> other mechanisms) or both.
>
> We are soliciting novel work that adopts a socio-technical perspective
> to address open research issues such as coordination and its
> relationship with empirical software engineering, software
> architectures, software processes and development and collaboration
> tools. We encourage the submission of papers utilizing methodological
> approaches traditionally used in other disciplines such as computer
> science, mathematical science, social and management sciences.
> However,
> all papers should make a significant contribution to the literatures
> on
> empirical software engineering, software architectures or software
> processes.
>
> Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
>
> * Measuring and assessing the impact of techniques that address
> shortcomings in socio-technical environments of commercial and open
> source projects.
> * Models and techniques for reasoning about tradeoffs between
> congruence and desirable technical characteristics of software
> systems.
> * Advances in methods based on social network analysis applied
> to
> the coordination and congruence in software development projects
> * The development and evaluation of novel methods, processes and
> tools to increase coordination and awareness amongst members of
> software
> teams
> * Methods of mining technical dependencies and inferring
> communication and coordination patterns in a project from software
> repositories.
> * Approaches to assess and maintain coordination across the
> entire
> software development life cycle.
> * Empirical studies evaluating approaches to identify
> coordination
> needs from architectural documentation and the impact of different
> styles of software architecture on coordination among development
> teams
>
> Manuscripts should adhere to the format guidelines defined by IEEE
> Computer Society, publisher of IEEE Transactions on Software
> Engineering. For further information, authors are welcomed to contact
> the editors of this special issue: marcelo.cataldo@us.bosch.com,
> katee@us.ibm.com, audris@avaya.com.
>
> Important Dates:
> Submission Deadline: 15 October 2009
> Major Revision Due: 26 February 2010
> Minor Revisions (if needed) Due: 23 April 2010
> Notification of final acceptance Due: 14 May 2010
> Publication Date: Mar/Apr 2011 Issue