Proceedings of the Conference on The Future of Software Engineering
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The need for research in this area is indicated by the serious shortfalls in our understanding of how best to design software for value creation. There are at least two basic dimensions to this shortfall. First, the core competency of software engineers is making technical software product and process design decisions. However, today there is a disconnect between the technical criteria taught to software engineers and the strategic value creation objectives of the organizations for which software is designed.This disconnect is reflected in the culture and the literature of software design. For example, of sixteen books on software architecture and object-oriented design surveyed, the word cost appeared in the index of only two. Part of the problem is that the links between technical concepts and value creation are not understood well, even in theory. We have an inadequate understanding of and a lack models for the connections between technical decision criteria and value. For example, we lack models for how information hiding modularity adds value to a system, and how much. Today this lack of understanding is intolerable. Software design and use decisions are coupled with fundamental business, public service, and other decisions in almost field. It is becoming critical to develop a better understanding of how software design decisions relate to value creation.The second dimension of the problem is that existing knowledge in software economics is inadequate. To simplify, most present knowledge focuses on cost and risk reduction in traditional government or large industry projects; but today organizations are often driven more by competition and time-to-market as by direct cost. New life-cycle models and software technologies are also being used that tend to invalidate the empirical bases of older models.The EDSER workshops seek to raise the visibility of the economic dimension of software design and use and to foster the emergence and evaluation of economics-oriented concepts, models and tools to improve software production. The EDSER-2 Workshop was made possible in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-9804078.