RCoSE 2014 - 1st International Workshop on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering

Today, software development is conducted in increasingly turbulent business environments. Typically, fast-changing and unpredictable markets, complex and changing customer requirements, pressures of shorter time-to-market, and rapidly advancing information technologies are characteristics found in most software development projects. To address this situation, agile practices advocate flexibility, efficiency and speed.
While many software development companies have indeed succeeded in adopting agile practices in parts of their organisation, the focus for many organisations is predominantly at the team level. The other functions in the organisation, including customer relations, product management, R&D management and software release, in many companies still work in traditional slow cycles, measured in months and years.
Continuous software engineering refers to the organisational capability to develop, release and learn from software in rapid parallel cycles, typically hours, days or very small numbers of weeks. This includes determining new functionality to build, prioritising the most important functionality, evolving and refactoring the architecture, developing the functionality, validating it, releasing it to customers and collecting experimental feedback from the customers to inform the next cycle of development.
The capability to perform all these activities in days or a few weeks requires significant changes in the entire software engineering approach, including parallelising activities, empowering cross functional teams to allow for rapid decision making and light weight coordination across teams. It also requires significant technical advances in the engineering infrastructure, including continuous integration and deployment, collection of post-deployment product usage data, support for running automatic live experiments to evaluate different system alternatives, e.g., A/B testing.
In summary, as reaching the goal of continuous software engineering is a holistic endeavor, it cannot be addressed only by research in the area of process aspects in software engineering, specifically, agile software development processes. Instead, it requires additionally to address the following three aspects:
The technology for all different phases of software engineering like requirements engineering, architecture and design, implementation, and validation and verification must be adapted to support for parallel engineering of software.
The whole research and development organization must adapt to be compatible with the agile process in the development teams.
Approaches for live experimentation must be available and the results must be appropriately fed back into the artifacts of the different phases which are affected by the results of the live experimentation.
Consequently, the workshop aims to bring the research communities of the aforementioned areas together to exchange challenges, ideas, and solutions to bring software engineering a step further to being a holistic continuous process.
RCoSE 2014 is co-located with ICSE 2014, the International Conference on Software Engineering, in Hyderabad, India. RCoSE will be a highly interactive workshop with a strong emphasis on discussions.
As a summary, topics relevant to the scope of the workshop include rapid continuous software engineering as described above and specifically the following:
agile practices
relations between agile practices and the specific development phases, e.g., requirements engineering, architectural design, programming languages, validation and verification
organizational aspects of agile processes
tools supporting continuous software engineering
application / system monitoring
live and automatic experimentation and quick feedback of experimental results
usability / human computer interaction
software evolution
software maintainance
Submissions
We are solicitating full research papers (up to 10 pages) and position papers (up to 6 pages). Full research papers present original and evaluated research whereas position papers describe novel ideas, identified challenges, or experiences related to the workshop's theme. The paper has to follow the ICSE 2014 formatting and submission instructions. Please submit your abstract and paper using the EasyChair page for the workshop: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=....
Special Issue
The authors of the best papers of the workshop will be invited to submit a revised and extended version of their paper to a special issue in the Journal Science of Computer Programming subject to further review.