This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Conference on Software Engineering Approaches for Offshore and Outsourced Development, SEAFOOD 2007, Zurich, Switzerland, in February 2007. The 15 revised full papers constitute a balanced mix of academic and industrial aspects and address topical regions such as processes, education, country reports, evaluation and assessment, communication and distribution, as well as tools.
Majoreconomicupheavalscanhavethesortofe?ectthatSchumpeterforesaw60 yearsagoascreativedestruction.Inscienceandtechnology,equivalentupheavals resultfromeitherscienti?crevolutions(asobservedbyKuhn)ortheintroduction of what Christensen calls disruptive technologies. And in software engineering, there has been no technology more disruptive than outsourcing. That it should so quickly reach maturity and an unparalleled scale is truly remarkable; that it should now be called to demonstrate its sustainability in the current ?nancial turmoil is the challenge that will prove whether and how it will endure. Early signs under even the bleak market conditions of the last 12 months are that it will not only survive, it will ?rmly establish its role across the world of business. Outsourcing throws into sharp focus the entire software engineering life- cle. Topics as diverse as requirements analysis, concurrency and model-checking need to ?nd a composite working partnership in software engineering practice. This con?uence arises from need, not dogma, and the solutions required are those that will have the right e?ect on the associated activities in the world of the application: e.g., reducing the time for a transaction or making the results of a complex analysis available in real-time. While the business of outsourcing continues to be studied, the engineering innovations that make it compelling are constantly changing. It is in this milieu that this series of conferences has placed itself.
SEAFOOD 2009: Enabling Global Partnerships to Deliver on Business Needs Companies have been outsourcing areas of software development work for many years, either because of the engineering challenges or because the outsourced aspect is not central to their core business. A profound transformation has been a?ecting this model over recent years: a massive transfer of development - tivities from the USA and Europe to a skilled labor force in service-providing countries. This transformation has been driven by the demands of a global bu- ness climate seeking to increase the value delivery of IT investment. However, the ability to realize this value can prove problematic in practice. Of particular concern are the hidden costs of globally distributed models of working, such as understanding and communicating the true business needs across organizational and cultural boundaries. To address such issues, o?shore outsourcing requires di?erent support from in-housedevelopmentandthismeansadaptingfamiliartechniques,processesand tools to this setting, as well as perhaps creating innovative new ones. Coupled with this industry transformation there is hence a pressing need to re-examine thosesoftwareengineeringapproachesthateither facilitate orimpede this model of working. With an inevitable focus on the economy in 2009, business decisions regarding the sourcing of software development projects will come under close scrutiny. It will become increasingly critical to design global partnerships that both clarify cost/bene?ts and enable delivery on business needs.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering Approaches for Offshore and Outsourced Development, SEAFOOD 2010, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, June 17-18, 2010. The four long plus the four short papers presented together with two keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions for inclusion in the book. The areas covered include industry challenges and best practices in offshore software development, distributed software development, risk management, and global software project management.
This book offers key insights into how to manage software development across international boundaries. It is based on a series of case studies looking at the relationships between firms from North America, the UK, Japan and Korea with Indian software houses. In these case studies, which have typically been compiled over a 3-4 year timespan, the authors analyse the multi-faceted challenges encountered in managing these Global Software Alliances (GSAs). These challenges range from the conflicts that managers face when dealing with distance, to the tensions of transferring knowledge across time and space, to issues in trying to establish universal standards in a context of constant change, and the problems of identity that developers and clients experience in having to deal with different organizations and countries. Throughout the book, the authors draw on their extensive research and experience to offer constructive advice on how to manage GSAs more effectively.
Process-Centered Software Engineering Environments (PSEEs) represent a new generation of software engineering environments in which the processes used to produce and maintain software products are explicitly modeled in the environment. PSEEs hold the exciting promise of enabling a significant increase in both software productivity and quality. The book presents a comprehensive picture of this emerging technology while highlighting the key concepts and issues. The first chapter introduces some of the basic concepts and developments behind PSEEs and discusses the unifying role it plays in combining project management, software engineering, and process engineering. The second chapter reviews related process modeling and representation concepts, terminology, and issues. Chapter 3 analyzes the features of some example PSEEs and Chapter 4 takes an inside look at the implementation of these features by describing specific design choices made by researchers. The last chapter discusses the evolution of PSEEs to accommodate practical issues in actual work settings and to play a more significant role in the software life cycle. The text is a collection of influential papers that will bring the newcomer quickly up to speed on this fast-moving field. For the researcher, the issues described in the text present a challenge to be conquered and directions to pursue. For the practitioner, they represent benefits that may be gained in the application of PSEEs in the work environment.
Oliver Skroch argues that the reuse of components and services counts among the few fundamental and most promising approaches to the development of high-quality and cost-effective application software. He presents research results related to strategic, tactic, and operational ranges of consideration in component- and service-oriented software development.
This book focusses on the identification of communication risks, their causes and effects and the practices to mitigate the risks from both state of the art and state of the practice perspectives. It's like puzzle solving game. According to Casey "Communication is one the biggest issue that cause due to geographical, temporal and socio-cultural distances". At the end of the book authors provide set of recommendations based on the best practices that need to be followed by the globally distributed organizations to achieve communicated environment just like co-located settings.
This book attempts to synthesize research that contributes to a better understanding of how to reach sustainable business value through information systems (IS) outsourcing. Important topics in this realm are how IS outsourcing can contribute to innovation, how it can be dynamically governed, how to cope with its increasing complexity through multi-vendor arrangements, how service quality standards can be met, how corporate social responsibility can be upheld and how to cope with increasing demands of internationalization and new sourcing models, such as crowdsourcing and platform-based cooperation. These issues are viewed from either the client or vendor perspective, or both. The book should be of interest to all academics and students in the fields of Information Systems, Management and Organization as well as corporate executives and professionals who seek a more profound analysis and understanding of the underlying factors and mechanisms of outsourcing.
Collaboration among individuals – from users to developers – is central to modern software engineering. It takes many forms: joint activity to solve common problems, negotiation to resolve conflicts, creation of shared definitions, and both social and technical perspectives impacting all software development activity. The difficulties of collaboration are also well documented. The grand challenge is not only to ensure that developers in a team deliver effectively as individuals, but that the whole team delivers more than just the sum of its parts. The editors of this book have assembled an impressive selection of authors, who have contributed to an authoritative body of work tackling a wide range of issues in the field of collaborative software engineering. The resulting volume is divided into four parts, preceded by a general editorial chapter providing a more detailed review of the domain of collaborative software engineering. Part 1 is on "Characterizing Collaborative Software Engineering", Part 2 examines various "Tools and Techniques", Part 3 addresses organizational issues, and finally Part 4 contains four examples of "Emerging Issues in Collaborative Software Engineering". As a result, this book delivers a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview and empirical results for researchers in academia and industry in areas like software process management, empirical software engineering, and global software development. Practitioners working in this area will also appreciate the detailed descriptions and reports which can often be used as guidelines to improve their daily work.
