Software Product Management in rapidly changing contexts

Product success depends on skilled and competent product management. In essence, a product manager decides what functionality and quality a product should offer, to which customers, and when in time, while assuring a winning business case.
Software product management includes working with requirements, release definitions, product lifecycles, the creation and interpretation of product strategies, balancing long-term technology push with shorter-term market-pull, and assuring a successful business case by selecting the right requirement for realization.
After the success of the previous workshops (collocated with the recent RE conferences) this workshop aims at bringing practitioners and research experts together for exchanging ideas, knowledge, and experience, and for setting a research agenda based on industry needs.

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Objectives
* Develop the software product management body of knowledge; identify challenges and future avenues for research relevant for both academia and industry.
* Strengthen software product management as a research field within the greater field of software engineering and business management.
* Provide software product managers and researchers a dedicated forum for exchanging ideas and best practices, thus fostering industry-academia collaboration.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
*Product management: for software, software-intensive systems, information technology, software as a service and cloud computing
*Product portfolios and life-cycles: managing software product innovation based on open source components while providing balanced contribution vs. differentiation strategies.
*Product management in growing size and complexity:, ensuring the intended software product qualities with balance between control and innovation.
*Product management for rapidly changing software products: methods for managing the quantity and paste of changes in the most demanding software markets.
*Product management for software product lines, decision-making in application and domain engineering,
*Product planning: product visioning, strategy, roadmapping, and release definition.
*Collaboration in software ecosystems and supply networks: subcontracting, partnering, tendering, negotiation, coordination, and control.
*Business aspects: business case development, business planning, and marketing.
*Product management environments: SME’s, large-scale organizations, cross-company ecosystems, and global settings.
*Product management performance: measurement, development, and improvement of product management processes, practices, skills, and competence.
*Tools for product management.

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Paper preparation, submission and evaluation

We invite original submissions of high quality papers in 2 categories:

* Research papers – technical solutions and empirical studies. Research papers explain the addressed problem, its relevance to the workshop topics, and the research approach. Solution papers are additionally expected to include preliminary validation.
* Industry practice papers – experience reports and problem statements. Industry papers provide sufficient context for understanding the reported challenges. Experience reports additionally describe the insights gained and the general lessons learned for software product management.

In both categories it is possible to submit:

* Full papers (up to 10 pages) or
* Short/position/vision papers (up to 4 pages).

Prospective authors are invited to submit high quality papers written in English via the EasyChair submission system:
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=iwspm11


Submissions must be formatted according to the IEEE CS proceedings format. Instructions and templates:
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/formatting


All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the program committee and selected based on workshop relevance, academic rigor (only research papers), innovation, industrial applicability, and quality of writing. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop program and proceedings. At least one author is required to register and participate during the workshop.

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Workshop proceedings and best paper award
Proceedings of accepted papers will appear in electronic format, in the IEEE CS Digital Library.
There will be a best paper award in terms of an opportunity for publication of an extended version as a journal publication in the Requirements Engineering Journal.

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IMPORTANT DATES

Abstracts Due: June 3, 2011
Papers due: June 17, 2011
Notification of acceptance: July 10, 2010
Camera-ready papers due: July 28, 2010
Preliminary program: July 29 2010
Early-bird registration: TBA
IWSPM 2011: August 30, 2011

All deadlines are 23:59 Apia, Samoa time.

ADVISORY BOARD
Sjaak Brinkkemper, (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
Christof Ebert, (Vector Consulting Services, Germany)
Tony Gorschek, (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden)
Samuel Fricker, (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Hamish Barney (Atlassian, Australia),
David Callele (TRLabs, Canada),
Maya Daneva (University of Twente, The Netherlands ),
Christof Ebert (Vector Consulting Services, Germany),
Samuel Fricker (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden),
Tony Gorschek (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden),
Paul Grünbacher (Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria),
Gerald Heller (Hewlett-Packard, Germany),
Andrea Herrmann (Axivion, Germany),
Alan Hevner (University of South Florida, USA),
Slinger Jansen (Utrecht University, The Netherlands),
Lena Karlsson, (Sony Ericsson, Sweden),
Mahvish Khurum (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden),
Hans-Bernd Kittlaus (InnoTivum, Germany),
Nazim Madhavji (The University of Western Ontario, Canada),
Sten Minör (Sigrun, Sweden),
Oscar Pastor (Technical University of Valencia, Spain),
Birgit Penzenstadler (University of Technology, Munich, Germany),
Björn Regnell (Lund University, Sweden),
Guenther Ruhe (University of Calgary, Canada),
Klaus Schmid (University of Hildesheim, Germany),
Kari Smolander (Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland),
Pasi Tyrväinen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland),
Tony Wasserman (Carnegie Mellon University, USA),
Inge van de Weerd (Utrecht University, The Netherlands),
Wei Zhang (Peking University, China)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Marjo Kauppinen, Program co-chair
(Aalto University, Finland)

Krzysztof Wnuk, Program co-chair
(Lund University, Sweden):