BACKGROUND

Software engineering has long been recognized as a human activity with significant communication, coordination and collaborative needs. Socio-technical congruence is broadly defined as the match between the coordination requirements established by the dependencies among tasks and the actual coordination activities carried out by the workers. The concept of congruence has been previously suggested as an important concept in system and organizational design [1, 4]. However, new approaches to congruence introduces a new way of thinking about coordination and communication among interdependent development teams by focusing on a fine-grain level of analysis of different types of product dependencies [2, 3, 5]. Promising results have been reported in terms of the impact of congruence on development productivity [3] as well as approaches for analyzing the implications of congruence [5]. The first two instance of this workshop, STC 2008/2009, provided a fruitful environment for discussion of open research questions in the area of congruence and future directions. Workshop participants presented a collection of innovative ideas in terms of measurement of congruence, data analysis methods, approaches to examine the implications of congruence or the lack of it as well as case studies of socio-technical congruence at play in different organizational settings.

Despite the valuable contributions of our past workshops, there is a clear need to further developments and a third instance of the STC workshop represents an important step forward. For instance, new measurement approaches of congruence are needed, particularly, those capable of capturing relevant technical dependencies at different stages of the development process such as architectural design, detailed design and implementation. A deeper analysis of the implications of socio-technical congruence at different levels of analysis and across different organization settings (e.g. open source and distributed development) is required. In addition, the development of mechanisms for assessing and utilizing congruence measures to improve software design and development through novel tools, processes and practices

WORKSHOP THEME

The topics of interest for STC 2010 include, but are not limited to:

* Definitions of coordination and congruence in the context of software engineering and their relationship to dependencies
* Examining the relationship between different types of dependencies, coordination capabilities and actual coordination activities
* Examining the range of problems in software development organizations that can be thought as coordination problems
* Measuring congruence in different types of software projects
* Comparative analysis of factors influencing congruence in different organizational settings such as open source, outsourcing, global distribution.
* Assessing the impact of development practices on congruence
* Approaches to assess and maintain congruence across the entire software development life cycle
* Architectural and organizational tactics for achieving better congruence
* Variation in the type and nature of coordination required when developing in different architectural styles
* Analytical techniques for identifying patterns of technical dependency requiring coordination
* Tools for assessing and visualizing congruence at the individual, group or organizational level
* Analytical techniques and tools for extracting congruence from historical data repositories.

WORKSHOP GOALS

The third instance of the STC workshop has the following several overlapping goals:

* Start addressing the research topics outlined above.
* Exchange ideas on existing and novel analysis methods and tools for using them.
* Begin to provide practical approaches that industry can use now or in the near future to improve project coordination.
* Continue to foster an interdisciplinary research community around this important topic.
* Continue raising awareness of this topic.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Marcelo Cataldo, Bosch Corporate Research, USA, marcelo.cataldo@us.bosch.com
Marcelo Cataldo is a Senior Researcher at Robert Bosch Corporate Research. His research interests are in geographically distributed software development and collaborative software engineering. Marcelo’s current research effort focuses on the development and empirical evaluation of mechanisms to measure socio-technical congruence and assess its impact on technical work. Marcelo has served in the PC of ICGSE 2009, CHASE 2009 and he is a Guest Editor in an upcoming special issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering on the topic of socio-technical environments in software development.

Daniela Damian, University of Victoria, Canada, danielad@cs.uvic.ca
Daniela Damian is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Victoria, Canada. Her research focuses on collaboration and coordination aspects of software engineering and as related to requirements engineering, with a special emphasis on global software development. Daniela was the main organizer of ICSE Workshops on Global Software Engineering for three consecutive years (2002-04) and also the PC Co-chair for the 2006 IEEE Conference on Global Software Engineering. She is serving on the Editorial Board of a number of software engineering and human-computer interaction journals, as well as on the PC of several conferences including ICSE and FSE.

Premkumar Devanbu, University of California, Davis, USA, Devanbu@cs.ucdavis.edu
Prem Devanbu is Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis. His recent work has been focused on the analysis of large, longitudinal, multi-dimensional data sets streaming out of open-source projects. He is specifically interested the long-term mutual interaction between software design and social structure. Devanbu was program chair of ACM SIGSOFT 2006, and has served on ICSE and FSE PCs on several occasions. He is also on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto, Canada, sme@cs.toronto.edu
Steve Easterbrook is a Professor of Computer Science at University of Toronto. His research lies at the intersection of formal software systems modeling, and socio-cognitive aspects of team interaction, including topics such as multi-stakeholder requirements negotiation, model management, and reasoning with inconsistent information. He was general chair of the Symposium on Requirements Engineering, RE 01, program chair for the Automated Software Engineering Conference, ASE 06, and Program Coordinator for ICSE 07. He served as workshops chair at RE'05 and ICSE' 2006, and (co-)chaired many workshops at ASE, ICSE, RE, and CASCON.

James Herbsleb, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, jdh@cs.cmu.edu
James Herbsleb is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, whose research interests focus on global software development, open source, and more generally on collaboration and coordination in software projects. He has served on the PC of several conferences, including ICSE and FSE, was co-chair of CSCW 2004, and serves as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.

Audris Mockus, Avaya Labs Research, USA, audris@avaya.com
Audris Mockus is a Research Scientist at Avaya Labs. He conducts research of complex dynamic systems. He designs data mining methods to summarize and augment the system evolution data, interactive visualization techniques to inspect, present, and control the systems, and statistical models and optimization techniques to understand the systems. Audris Mockus was a PC co-chair of the Metrics'2004 and of the Global Software Engineering'07 and served on the PC of several conferences, including ICSE. He has co-organized the workshop on Mining Software Repositories and serves on the editorial board of the TSE and of the Empirical Software Engineering.

MAIN CONTACT

Marcelo Cataldo
Robert Bosch Corporate Research
http://www.marcelocataldo.net/Home
marcelo.cataldo@us.bosch.com
+1 412 325 6763 (ph)
+1 412 323 9308 (fax)

PROGRAM COMMITEE
Leonard Bass, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, ljb@sei.cmu.edu
Matthew Bass, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, mbass@cmu.edu
Andrew Begel, Microsoft Research, USA, andrew.begel@microsoft.com
Yuanfang Cai, Drexel University, USA, yfcai@cs.drexel.edu
Kate Ehrlich, IBM TJ Watson, USA, katee@us.ibm.com
Mary Helander, IBM TJ Watson, USA, helandm@us.ibm.com
James Howison, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, jameshow@andrew.cmu.edu
Irwin Kwan, University of Victoria, irwink@cs.uvic.ca
Anita Sarma, University of Nebraska, USA, asarma@cse.unl.edu
Giuseppe Valetto, Drexel University, USA, valetto@cs.drexel.edu
Patrick Wagstrom, IBM TJ Watson, USA, pwagstro@us.ibm.com
Clay Williams, IBM TJ Watson, USA, clayw@us.ibm.com

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: 1 February 2010
Notification to authors: 8 March 2010
Final papers due: 5 April 2010

SUBMISSIONS

Both research papers (10 page max) and position papers (4 page max) will be accepted. Submissions should be in pdf format, and should use the ICSE 2010 submission template.

Submissions are being handled online by EasyChair: STC 2010 submission web site
Proceedings

STC 2010 is intended to be primarily a forum for presentation and discussion of new ideas, preliminary results, novel approaches, and new research questions. In order to allow the free flow of ideas without pre-empting any future publications, we do not plan to place papers in the ACM or IEEE digital libraries. All accepted papers will be distributed at the workshop, and those who wish will have their papers made accessible to the public on the workshop web site.

REFERENCES

[1] Burton, R.M. and Obel, B. Strategic Organizational Diagnosis and Design. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.
[2] Cataldo, M., Wagstrom, P., Herbsleb, J.D., Carley, K. Identification of coordination requirements: Implications for the design of collaboration and awareness tools. In Proc. of CSCW’06, Banff, Canada, 2006.
[3] Cataldo, M., Herbsleb, J.D., Carley, K.Socio-Technical Congruence: A Framework for Assessing the Impact of Technical and Work Dependencies on Software Development Productivity. In Proceedings of ESEM’08, Kaiserlaurnter, Germany, 2008.
[4] Conway, M.E. How Do Committees Invent? Datamation, 14, 4, 1968.
[5] Valetto, G., Helander, M. E., Ehrlich, K., Chulani, S., Wegman, M. N., & Williams, C. Using Software Repositories to Investigate Socio-technical Congruence in Development Projects. In Proceedings of MSR’07, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2007.