[ecoop-info] CfP: Business Impact of Process Improvements Workshop at ICSE 2008

[info at bipi-ws.org]

Call for Papers

Business Impact of Process Improvements (BIPI 2008) Workshop

Workshop held at International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008) 

http://www.bipi-ws.org

Workshop Date: May 13, 2008 in Leipzig, Germany


Workshop Overview 
Process improvement is key to align engineering with business needs. 
A lot of effort and resources is put on process improvement, but not so often 
the effects are visible in the busines scorecards. In fact half of improvement 
and reengineering programs fail to deliver value. The topic of this workshop 
is achieving tangible and sustainable business impact from process improvements. 
Focus is on approaches that show practical and quantifiable value. 
The kinds of engineering process improvements addressed include, but are 
not limited to, the introduction of lean development, usage of process improvement 
frameworks or better quality control. The business impact should be illustrated 
through either increasing the value of what is delivered to the customer 
(such as better selection of requirements) or reducing the cost to deliver 
(such as reducing rework). The participants will share experiences how to 
reliably set-up, measure and achieve business-oriented process improvements 
in order to increase return on investment in software engineering.

The topic of BIPI-2008 is business impact of process improvements with a 
strong focus on approaches that are both practical and quantifiable. 

Assuming, as a basis that an organization has an at least repeatable process
and has some basic measurement system in place, then the organization
should be able to achieve and measure the benefits of introducing, e.g.
- State of the practice engineering methodology, such as model-driven development
- More agile/lean engineering and management practices
- Incremental delivery
- Iterative development
- Improved communication and interaction with customers and end users
- Strengthened requirements engineering 
- A maturity framework such as CMMI or SPICE
- Quantitative and statistical management, such as Six Sigma
- Better innovation management
- World-wide collaboration with distributed engineering teams, suppliers, partners, and clients
- Product life-cycle management
- Flexible development practices
- Quality control techniques
- Other improvement approaches 

Business impacts will then be targeted and measured with one or 
more of the following dimensions:
- Reduced development and product life-cycle cost
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Higher motivation of engineering teams
- Improved quality and reduced cost of non-quality
- Less frictions and overheads in the development and service processes
- Shortened time to market and time to profit
- Better estimation accuracy
- Stronger ability to incorporate customer feedback

For improving the business impact we can 
- increase the value of what is delivered (closer to what customer 
wants or early realization of benefits)
and/or
- reduce the cost of producing and maintaining what is delivered 
(including reduction of rework, maintenance cost, etc)
We focus on how to reliably measure and achieve the impact of process improvements 
in practice so that we can improve the return of investment in software engineering. 

Workshop Goals
The workshop goal is to establish a forum where practically applicable measurement
approaches can be used to show the business impact of process improvements.
Too often, there is too little connection to the impact for the business and in such 
a way that the recommended approaches are able to be applied in practice. 

Target Audience
This workshop will bring together a mix of industrial and academic participation. 
Our expectation is that more than half of the audience will be from industry. 
We target an unbiased view of the state-of-the-art of software process 
improvement and its business impact. The selection of papers will be 
based on academic rigor, innovation, industrial relevance, and quality of writing. 
The reviews must be of high-level and the reviewers must provide the 
authors of papers with at least three literary references that are relevant to the work.

Workshop Proceedings
Accepted submissions for the workshop will be between 6-10 pages. 
The workshop papers will be published in the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries.

Workshop Paper Submission
We will use ICSE 2008’s facilities for CyberChairPRO for both the submission 
and review processes. Details will be made available on the BIPI workshop 
web page well before submission deadline.

Important Dates
Jan. 24, 2008 Deadline for Workshop Paper Submission
Feb. 7, 2008 Notification of Acceptance
Feb. 21, 2008 Deadline for Camera-ready Papers for ICSE Workshop Proceedings

Workshop Organizers (see web page for Workshop PC)
- Frances Paulisch, Siemens AG, Germany
- Christof Ebert, Vector Consulting Services, Germany

Further Information:
E-mail: info at bipi-ws.org
URL: http://www.bipi-ws.org