OVERVIEW

Traceability defines and maintains relationships among the artifacts involved in the software-engineering life cycle. This mechanism is widely used for purposes as project visibility and accountability, and it provides an essential support for developing high-quality software systems. Traceability has traditionally been strongly influenced by software process drivers; however, during the last few years, the software process is starting to take into account new drivers. One such driver is the software product's value. The global value of a product can be understood as the perceived benefits in relation to its cost. Both business and technical areas of an organization consider the value concept as a priority, for analyzing software costs and benefits. For these purposes, a tight interaction between these two sides is fundamental.

From the perspective of traceability, the value consideration may change many assumptions. For instance, the development artifacts that are involved in traceability (requirement, user story, design items, test unit, etc) should contain the necessary information to estimate its value under a given context. Similarly, traceability items (tracing links, tasks or resources to support traceability) need also to consider the value concept. Thereafter, the traditional traceability schemes seem to be too limited for describing and tracing the value. Since, business areas are involved and interested in software value tracing, the traceability approaches need to be more streamlined than those ones more technical oriented. Additionally, the agile community advocates the advantages of lean traceability for avoiding bothersome tasks that are difficult to perform in agile contexts.


OBJECTIVES AND OUTCOMES

The workshop aims to provide the attendees with an opportunity to develop a common research agenda through paper presentations, brainstorming, discussion and building consensus on important directions. As outcome, a report will be produced based on the workshop results. A main expected result is to share among participants proved approaches in organizations.


TOPICS

The workshop encourages paper submissions from both industry and academy, about research challenges, work in progress approaches, or industrial experiences reports. Topics can be, but not limited, the following:

* Tracing methods for supporting the global value estimation of the
software product
* Traceability approaches to integrate business and technical values
* Tracing methods for preserving the integrated product value,
across the product development lifecycle
* Approaches for automated traceability in agile
* Value-Based traceability for supporting product release management
* Traceability techniques for supporting value-based product
features prioritization
* Tracing techniques for managing the value of the prioritized
requirements, during the product implementation
* Lean traceability across product life, for supporting the value
management
* Lean traceability and product architectures
* Lean tracing methods and V\&V
* Risk Management and value-based traceability
* Accountability and lean tracing methods
* Software innovation and traceability
* Etc.


WORKSHOP FORMAT

The workshop agenda will be divided into two different parts. In the first part, authors of the accepted papers will make a brief presentation of their contributions, following by a brief discussion based on the paper ideas among all attendees. A specific attendee will be asked to previously read a paper to state several key papers' ideas, in order to motivate the discussion. In the second part, plenary and interactive stand-up discussion will allow us to consolidate our conclusions.


SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION

VALSOT seeks submissions of position papers and short papers up to 5 pages in length. All submitted papers will undergo a peer-review process, by at least two reviewers. Papers will be selected based on originality, quality, soundness and relevance. The VALSOT proceedings will be published with an ISBN code. We are negotiating with the ACM to publish the workshop proceedings in the ACM Digital Library. As such, all submissions should be prepared using the ACM Digital Library style (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates).

Please, submit your paper electronically through the EasyChair system: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=valsot2011.

Email for inquiries: valsot -at- syst.eui.upm.es