WERSBUS is cancelled.  Please visit the EPIC workshop/ website instead.

 

For software development to be a successful business activity, it is not enough to deliver software products which satisfy customers´ written specification. Software businesses also deem important to deliver in time and on budget, to increase developers´ satisfaction and to achieve process improvement. Collective efforts by software engineering practitioners, consultants and researchers have yielded a huge variety of solutions for improving software processes, products and services. While it is generally known that the suitability and effectiveness of most of these solutions depend on the context where they are applied, only few empirical studies were done to uncover how the current process/product/service-focused approaches used in software businesses yield improvement outcomes that are aligned to the software business goals of these organizations. With few exceptions, little is known about the empirical evidence that can possibly confirm or disconfirm the claims of effectiveness of different commercially viable approaches that solve particular process, product or service related problems. The 1^st Workshop on Evidence-based Research for Software Business Success (WERSBuS 2010) promotes the position that science should help software businesses by empirical research on which method, technique, or tool to apply best under which conditions and in which combination. The primary goal of this workshop is to create a forum and a community to debate the need and value of using evidence-based approaches to researching aspects of software processes, products and services that contribute to software business success. The workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers to come up with novel ideas about how software industry and software engineering science can profit more from each other by practicing evidence-based research approaches. To practitioners in software businesses, the workshop will provide an opportunity to learn about good empirical research and how to judge the trustworthiness of the current results of evaluation research. To researchers, the workshop will provide ideas on which research questions are relevant for practice, how to organize for industry-relevant research, including how to sell research ideas, how to acquire industry partners, and how to close communication gaps between research and industry.