No abstract

Much has been written on process models, project management or tool support to increase the return on investment in software through higher quality of the development process and the resulting software or system. Yet, we lack understanding in the underlying economic principles; e.g., an external firm paid to develop software for someone else tries to maximize their own profit instead of the contractor's. These divergences of interests result in projects that consume more time and money and meet fewer requirements than expected. In this paper, we try to fill the gap by providing an insight into the theory and presenting applicable suggestions how to diminish or avoid the problems that arise when selecting the 'best' contractor and during the project. Basic advises on the formulation of contracts can be derived.

Much has been written on process models, project management or tool support to increase the return on investment in software through higher quality of the development process and the resulting software or system. Yet, we lack understanding in the underlying economic principles; e.g., an external firm paid to develop software for someone else tries to maximize their own profit instead of the contractor's. These divergences of interests result in projects that consume more time and money and meet fewer requirements than expected. In this paper, we try to fill the gap by providing an insight into the theory and presenting applicable suggestions how to diminish or avoid the problems that arise when selecting the 'best' contractor and during the project. Basic advises on the formulation of contracts can be derived.

Today, distributed projects, often subsumed under terms like global software development (GSD), global collaboration, offshoring etc. are common ways to overcome time and budget restrictions or lack of personnel. Thus, today's projects take place in a global context. But developing software with geographically distributed teams presents a unique set of challenges that influence virtually all aspects of a project and make them more complex. This workshop addressed topics relevant in multi-site projects like tooling, process support, economic aspects, project management and collaboration and communication.

The Global Studio Project integrated the work of Software Engineering students spread across four countries into a single project and represented, for most of the students, their first major "real-world" development experience. Interviews indicated that the major areas of learning were informal skills that included learning to establish and work effectively within a team, learning how to react quickly to frequent changes in requirements, architecture and organization, and learning to manage and optimize communications. Since all these skills require rapid reaction to unpredictable factors, we view them as improvisation and discuss the role of experiential education in facilitating improvisation.