-------- Original-Nachricht -------- Betreff: [WI] CfP: Studying Work Practices in Global Software Development (Special Issue IST) Datum: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:51:25 +0100 Von: Volker Wulf volker.wulf@fit.fraunhofer.de Antwort an: volker.wulf@uni-siegen.de An: Liste@fit.fraunhofer.de:Wirtschaftsinformatik wi@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de

Call for Papers - Information and Software Technology (IST)

Special Issue on

Studying Work Practices in Global Software Engineering http://www.idc.ul.ie/gsd/IST_Special_Issue_SWP.html

Submission Desdline: June 15th, 2009

Guest editors: - Gabriela Avram, Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland - Volker Wulf, University of Siegen and Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, Germany

Background and rationale Software development is increasingly distributed across geographical, political, social, and cultural boundaries. Enterprises that wish to take advantage of globalization require innovative techniques, tools, and practices to overcome the various difficulties of organizing and managing globally distributed software development. The field of Global Software Engineering (GSE) or Global Software Development (GSD), as it is sometimes called, has emerged as a transdisciplinary research arena bringing together software engineers as well as social scientists and organization theorists involved in examining various aspects of how globally distributed software teams function. However, while many experimental studies on problem-solving in teams have been performed, as well as interview studies with management referring to problems in distributed coordination and management, extensive participative field study material on actual workplace practices is relatively meagre. Thus, despite of occasional empirical studies of distributed software development activities over the years there is still a dearth of well-designed studies in Information Systems, Software Engineering and CSCW that provide good examples of field research in the area.

Goals and objective The purpose of this special issue is to examine practices of global software engineering and to reflect upon the strengths and limitations of empirical research methods being deployed in the field. Methods are not simply techniques to be chosen and deployed at will, but are constructed from particular conceptual worldviews, and entail theoretical commitments. Actual use of methods also requires training and sensitivity to the local situation. These issues are often not adequately dealt with before the researcher enters the field.

In order to illustrate this topic in a concrete fashion, we are soliciting papers from researchers who are actively engaged in empirical studies of GSE and wish to reflect on their empirical findings in relation to the methods applied. We are interested in field studies of actual in situ practices of software engineers.

Potential topics for the papers (but not limited to these!) are:

* The strengths and limitations of particular empirical methods; * The variety of ways in which methods can be used in practice, grounded in specific GSE case studies; * Studying the same topic in different environments; * Gaining access to GSD field sites; * Gaining access to digital artefacts; particular issues with gaining access to source code; * Approaches that go beyond a one-sided local view; * Methods and tools for disentangling complex work trajectories and situating artefacts; * Methods for a quick familiarization with the context: participation in social events, regular meetings, recruiting informants; * Different roles the researcher could adopt; * Dealing with micro-political conflicts in the field; * Dealing with different languages and cultural issues; * Roles of consultants vs. researchers: to what extent and in what circumstances is a consulting role acceptable/desirable? * Opportunities for engaging in a shared commitment with the practitioners in order to identify potentials for change and conjoint learning (e.g. concept of "business ethnography"); * Shortcomings and benefits of exploratory and evolutionary research designs compared to more statistical approaches with predefined hypotheses (i.e., why is it important for the GSD community to take into account this kind of research instead of doing experiments and such?), * Using student groups as proxies in GSE studies.

Submission information Authors are invited to submit papers on their field study research, providing an account of the rationale for the choice of research method(s) being used, showing how these relate to the research questions being examined, and interesting findings attained by using the method.

Papers should conform to the IST Elsevier format and be submitted as PDF files.

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