ARES 2006

"Value-based Software Engineering for Dependable Software-Intensive Systems" (VBSE DSS)

“Bridging the gap between business case, management, and engineering solutions”

Theme and Goals

Software increasingly contributes added value to systems such as cars, aircraft, and consumer products. However, such systems have to fulfill conflicting requirements such as high dependability, high performance, superior usability, low cost, and short evolution cycles. To achieve optimal value trade-offs between the interests of customers and the capabilities engineering solutions need to be better understood and balanced.
Basic engineering principles of discipline, economy, rigor, quality, and utility, and, to a certain extent, repeatability and predictability are important value aspects of software engineering. As in conventional engineering, value considerations affect the trade-offs among these principles, but probably with much more subtlety, severity, and variety than they do in the engineering of hard products.

Traditionally, the study of software engineering has been primarily a technical endeavor with little attention given to its economic context. Value is typically not considered adequately in software engineering decisions and much of current practice and research is done in a value-neutral setting. Value, cost, and schedule of today's systems however increasingly rely on software and thus value-neutral software decisions can seriously degrade project outcomes.

The software engineering research community has not yet met the needs of the software industry because it has been largely unable to characterize the economic nature or consequences of engineering decisions. Increasingly, software engineers in organizations whose very existence is dependent upon the profitability of their software find themselves poorly equipped to make technical decisions that have significant but poorly understood economic consequences. Other disciplines, such as decision theory, game theory, and economics, have highly relevant conceptual and well-established ideas that have the potential to contribute to the foundations of software engineering, but the typical software engineer seldom encounters this work.

Goals of the workshop are in the scope of the ARES conference of dependable software systems: (a) to improve the understanding for trade-offs between system requirements and engineering solutions, (b) to improve the understanding of the involved stakeholders for the impact of requirements on engineering solutions and for the impact of engineering decisions on system and project value.

This workshop seeks to bring together both industrial practitioners and researchers interested in integrating value considerations into the existing and emerging software engineering principles and practices. In the scope of software-intensive systems with dependability as success-critical product quality aspect topics of interest in the workshop include, but are not restricted to the following:

- Value-based approaches for important software engineering activities (requirements engineering, architecting, design and development, verification and validation, planning and control, risk management, quality management, or people management)

- Stakeholder Value Proposition Elicitation and Reconciliation
- Trade-off modeling for quality/value attributes in software engineering.
- Business case analysis of dependable software-based systems

- Software Product Studies
- Risk and Opportunity Management

- Value-Based Monitoring and Control
- Synchronization for improved collaboration in multi-discipline and/or multi-company system development teams.

- Requirements Elicitation and Management: tracing stakeholder value from their origins to requirements and engineering solution deliverables in the system life cycle
- Intermediate models to bridge the gap between requirements and engineering solution architecture

- Software Process Models and Improvement research and experience (such as the V-Model XT)
- Industry experience reports on software engineering aspects of software-based systems with dependability as success-critical product quality aspect.

Key References

Biffl, S., Aurum, A., Boehm, B., Erdogmus H., Grünbacher P.: Value-based Software Engineering. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg; September 2005
Boehm B.: Value-Based Software Engineering. Software Eng. Notes 28(2), 2003, 1-12
Boehm, B. W. and Huang, L.G.: Value-based Software Engineering: A Case Study, IEEE Computer, March 2003 pp 33–41
Avizienis, A., Laprie, J., Randell, B., Landwehr, C.: „Basic Concepts and Taxonomy of Dependable and Secure Computing“, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Vol. 1, No. 1, January and March 2004 11-32
Nicol, D., Samders, W., Trivedi, K.: “Model-Based Evaluation: From Dependability to Security”, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Vol. 1, No. 1, January and March 2004: p. 48-65

Submission Guidelines

Submit a position paper (max. 4 pages) or full paper (max. 8 pages), including figures and references, using 10 fonts, and number each page. Contact author must provide the following information to the workshop chairs: paper title, authors' names, affiliations, postal address, phone, fax, and e-mail address of the author(s), about 200-250 word abstract, and about five keywords. Submit your paper as a PDF file to the workshop chairs.

Important Dates

- Submission Deadline: December, 23th 2005
- Author Notification: January, 15th 2006
- Author Registration: February, 1st 2006
- Camera-ready Version: February, 1st 2006

Workshop Organizers

Stefan Biffl
Vienna University of Technology
Stefan.Biffl@tuwien.ac.at

Paul Grünbacher
Johannes Kepler University Linz
paul.gruenbacher@jku.at

Program Committee

Barry W. Boehm (Univ. Southern Calif., USA)
Miklos Biro (Corvinus Univ., Hungary)
Günter Böckle (Siemens CT, Germany)
Torgeir Dingsoyr (SINTEF, Norway)
Walter Dürr (Austrian Aerospace, Austria)
Alexander Egyed (Teknowledge, USA)
Hakan Erdogmus (Nat. Research Council, Canada)
Walter Gutjahr (Univ. Vienna, Austria)
Li Guo Huang (Univ. Southern Calif., USA)
Jyrki Kontio (Helsinki Univ. of Tech. SBL, Finland)
Wolfgang Kranz (EADS, Germany)
Jürgen Münch (Fraunhofer IESE, Germany)
Hannes Omasreiter (DaimlerChrysler, Germany)
Dietmar Pfahl (Univ. Calgary, Canada)
Rudolf Ramler (SCCH, Austria)
Andreas Rausch (TU Kaiserslautern, Germany)
Günther Ruhe (Univ. Calgary, Canada)