General Chairs

Mathai Joseph, Tata Consultancy Services
Bertrand Meyer, ETH Zurich
Theme: 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 affecting this model over recent years: a massive transfer of development activities from the US and Europe to a skilled labour force in service-providing countries. This transformation has been driven by the demands of a global business climate seeking to increase the value delivery of IT investment. However, the ability to realise 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 organisational and cultural boundaries.

To address such issues, offshore outsourcing needs quite different support from in-house development and this means adapting familiar techniques, processes and 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 those software engineering approaches that either facilitate or impede 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/benefits and enable delivery on business needs.
About SEAFOOD

The aim of the SEAFOOD series of conferences is to examine offshore and outsourced software development from a software engineering perspective. It strives to:

* Highlight problems faced by industry and provide a forum to share good practices.
* Spotlight new processes, models, techniques and tools emerging from research efforts that are crucial to distributed development, and provide an opportunity for industry transfer.
* Build a community of educators either offering or planning to offer global software development experiences for students, so as to share project plans and lessons.

SEAFOOD is co-located with TOOLS EUROPE, so the use of object technology, component-based and/or model-based software development in globally distributed settings is a synergistic theme.

SEAFOOD 2009 aims to provide an intimate, highly structured and interactive forum for its participants, so it will be organising pre-assigned discussants for the various conference sessions. SEAFOOD 2009 also plans to organise an industry round table and an educational exchange forum for interested participants. Emerging tools for offshore and outsourced software development may be showcased to align with TOOLS EUROPE.
Topics

This year, we particularly invite papers that focus on processes, techniques and tools to understand, communicate and deliver on business needs in globally distributed software projects.

Broader topics of interest include, but are certainly not limited to, the following dimensions of globally distributed software projects:

* Strategic dimensions - scope decisions; cost/benefit analysis; value propositions; risk assessment and management; vendor selection.
* Process and management dimensions - process models, including distributed agile; project management; team organization; customer/supplier engagement and relationship management; supply chain management; knowledge transfer and management; project governance; quality assurance; metrics and measurement.
* Development dimensions - requirements engineering; system specification; architecture; configuration management; traceability; testing; maintenance; deployment.
* Infrastructure dimensions - technology and tooling.
* Social dimensions - effect of cultural differences on communication, coordination and collaboration; socialisation and community building.
* Foundational dimensions - requirements and constraints that characterise offshore and outsourced processes; comparative studies of globally distributed, near-sourced and co-located software development.

For any information please contact:

seafood AT se.inf.ethz.ch.

Publication

The proceedings of SEAFOOD will be a volume in the Springer in the LNBIP series.

Important Dates

* Abstracts Submissions: February 13th, 2009 - 23:00, Apia time
* Paper Submissions: February 20th, 2009 - 23:00, Apia time
* Notification of acceptance: April 10th, 2009
* Camera-ready papers due: April 24th, 2009
* Preliminary program: end of April, 2009

Submissions

We invite original submissions of high quality papers in 3 distinct categories. Industry and education papers will be handled by specialist review tracks.

Research papers - technical solutions, empirical studies and survey papers. Research papers are expected to explain how the problem being addressed is relevant to the conference topics, describe the research approach, and solution papers are further to include preliminary validation.

Industry practice papers - country, industry and domain-specific reports. Industry papers are expected to provide sufficient context for understanding the challenges and insights, and to make the more general lessons for global software development clear to others.

Education and training papers - experience and proposal papers. Education papers are expected to explain the pedagogical goals of the work, critique their attainment (or not) and provide guidance for other educators.

In all 3 categories: Full papers (up to 15 pages) Short/position/vision papers (up to 6 pages)
Publication and Submission Instructions

The SEAFOOD 2009 conference proceedings will be published by Springer (in the LNBIP series).