Accountability and Traceability in Global Software Engineering(ATGSE2007)
Katsuro Inoue
Department of Computer Science
Osaka University
inoue@ist.osaka-u.ac.jp
Abstract
An Overview of the new workshop on
Accountability and Traceability in Global Software
Engineering (ATGSE2007) will be introduced here.

1. Introduction
This workshop will explore approaches tocollecting, analyzing, and reporting software
engineering metrics in projects that may be globally
distributed, involve multiple offshore companies, anduse combinations of open source and proprietary
software components.
While many companies and academic software
engineering researchers have explored ways to collectand analyze empirical software metrics within acompany, the reality of modern software development
involves outsourcing, offshore development, andintegration from multiple sources. Unfortunately,
corporate concerns often limit the availability and useof empirical data outside the project or company,
which can make providing accountability andtraceability for such projects difficult.
This workshop will examine the status of efforts tocollect and report software engineering metrics invarious Asian-Pacific countries, and some possible
approaches to extending the availability and use of thisinformation to suit the global outsourced software
engineering world.

2. Topics and Approach
The workshop will address several topics:

Mike Barker
Graduate School of Information Science
Nara Institute of Science and Technology
mbarker@is.naist.jp
one of the major concerns of customers. Empiricalsoftware engineering is considered to provide useful
information and evaluation of the remote
development sites and their products. Methods andapproach to use the empirical software engineering
for such environment will be discussed.
2. Empirical
specifications:

datacollection

methodsandSimple mechanisms to feedback raw empirical data
would not be sufficient for the global development,
since the details of the development sites are notknown for the remote sites. Some abstraction
mechanisms to encapsulate the details of thecollected empirical data will be explored.
3. Software development environments, including
global outsourcing and use of components frommultiple vendors:
Remote development with different time zones andcultures would cause various issues on the progressof software development. Mechanisms to share thedevelopment
informationwithdifferent
environments will be discussed.
4. Tools for collection and analysis of empirical data:
Versioning and configuration management systems
such as CVS, Subversion, and Visual SourceSafe aremajor resources of empirical data, together withissue tracking systems such as GNUTS and Bugzilla,
and other mail and log archives. These tools andother tools for the analyzing the collected data will
be discussed, from the view point of the global
development.

1. Status of empirical software engineering efforts invarious Asian-Pacific areas:

5. Visualization of empirical data and software
engineering processes:

Offshore development in Asia-Pacific areas is
becoming very popular, and quality of the software
products developed by remote development sites is

Intuitive presentation of the current status of theremote development would be essential for thecustomer of the global development. Various

techniques for visualize process and product data
will be presented.

6. Possible approaches to accountability andtraceability for offshore development based on
software engineering metrics:
In the case of controversy between the customer andvender, some validation method of the empirical
data will be needed. The idea of "Software Tag",
which contains various empirical data for validating
appropriateness and properness of the remote
software development, will be presented anddiscussed.
7. Social and economic impacts of accountability andtraceability in offshore development:
Non-technical issues such as cultural differences andmanagement issues such as cost control will bediscussed.
8. Research and collaboration possibilities to explore
concepts of accountability and traceability inoffshore development:
Researches on the global development essentiallyneed a collaboration of both customer side anddeveloper side researchers. Further topics for joint
research works will be discussed.

3. Prospect Results
The key result of the workshop will be a reportmapping the status of empirical software engineering
efforts in the Asian-Pacific areas and possible
approaches to accountability and traceability. The
report will also list necessary research areas dealing
with this.
This workshop has implications for software
maintenance and evolution, global softwaredevelopment outsourcing, software metrics andmeasurement, empirical software engineering, software

process improvement, quality management, andtesting, verification and validation among other topics
of interest to the APSEC 2007 community.
As embedded, ubiquitous software becomes anincreasingly important part of our lives, effective
accountability and traceability will become necessary.
This workshop will begin to build the necessary
foundations for this work.

4. Workshop Organizationz

General Chair: Michael Barker (NAIST/MIT)z

Program Chair: Katsuro Inoue (Osaka University)z

Program Committee:¾

Marcus Ciolkowski (Fraunhofer IESE)¾

Hajimu Iida (NAIST)¾

Pankaj Jalote (IIT Delhi)¾

Ross Jeffery (NICTA)¾

Philip Johnson (University of Hawaii)¾Dehua Ju (East China University of Scienceand Technology)¾

Shinji Kusumoto (Osaka University)¾Shuji Morisaki (NAIST)¾

Tien Nguyen (Iowa State University)¾David Notkin (University of Washington)¾

Ken-ichi Matsumoto (NAIST)¾

Harvey Siy (University of Nebraska)¾YulinWang(WuhanUniversity)