It is generally acknowledged that software process has an impact on the quality of the software product. In parallel with this, there is an ongoing debate what the structure of a process should look like to improve the required quality factors. Conventional software processes and the corresponding process improvement criteria such as for example as defined by the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination model (SPICE), have focused on an increased formalization of the process elements in order to control the process as much as possible. In contrast, the last years agile processes have been introduced that aim to reduce the large amount of documents, rules, notations and tools to deliver software faster. Both camps have claimed that their adopted process is delivering software with higher quality. An increasing number of researchers and practitioners though now share the view that instead of debating on a particular process we should focus on the identification of the important project parameters that are necessary to decide on the appropriate process. As such several researchers have proposed to combine plan-based and agile methods, while others have focused on process modeling and method engineering techniques in order to develop a customized process for the given project parameters.

In this workshop we are primarily interested in the relation between the process elements and their impact on the specific quality factors such as reusability, adaptability and maintainability. This workshop is a follow-up to the first IMPROQ workshop that has been held at Bilkent University in June 2003. In contrast to the first workshop, this workshop will take 2 days and aim to provide a more thorough understanding of the domain and the related research goals. The first day will primarily focus on paper presentations and the most fundamental problems. The second day will be oriented towards finding solutions and defining the research setting for the coming years.
 

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Limitations/advantages of plan-based processed on quality 

• Limitations/advantages of agile processes on quality

• Integrating plan-based and agile methods

• Meta-models for software development processes

• Software Process Modeling

• Method engineering

• Formalizing/modeling heuristic rules of methods

• Tailoring and composing methods

• Software process metrics

• Explicit reasoning on software quality factors in process

• Trade-off analysis of software quality factors in process

• Tools for automating processes

• Implications of aspect-oriented software development

• Implications of component-based software development

• Implications of the model-centric approaches (such as MDA) 

• Implications of UML standardization

Important Dates
Deadline for paper submission: May 3, 2004
Notification of acceptance: May 12, 2004
Submissions should be send to bedir@cs.utwente.nl