3rd international workshop on social software engineering

Abstract

Software is created by people, with people and for people. These people work in varying environments. They have their particular backgrounds and act under different conditions. Thus understanding the human and social aspects of software engineering is crucial to understanding how methods and tools are used, and thereby improving the creation and maintenance of software systems as well as the management of software projects. “Social Software Engineering” (SSE) focusses on the development of systems in highly uncertain domains, with evolving goals, frequent changes and much user involvement. SSE systems can often (but not exclusively) be found on the web. Related technical concepts are user feedback, mashups, perpetual beta. However, beneath technical expertise developing social software systems requires competency from other disciplines as diverse as psychology, organizational science or economics. Besides the advent of social software applications, software engineering research recognized in recent years that effective collaboration and knowledge sharing are essential in order to guarantee successful software development and maintenance. Methods and tools that support development teams must be based on interdisciplinary research efforts that investigate technologies, tools, processes and human factors in a holistic manner. While both directions - engineering social software and dealing with social aspects in the software engineering process - receive considerable attention, we think that ultimately, both might confluence into a new software engineering paradigm. This workshop provided a forum for discussing high quality research on the social aspects of software engineering and the engineering aspects of social software, as well as a meeting place for the community that is currently distributed over several research domains (software engineering, knowledge management, web 2.0, human computer interaction).