Background

Today, working together with colleagues in different locations as virtual teams is common - be it in distributed software projects, as much as in R&D projects or manifold business processes in companies across all industry sectors. Thus, "working in a team" has in many cases a global context in today's world. Improving effectiveness and efficiency of virtual teams is therefore an increasingly business-critical issue - and a complex one, since it has many aspects:

• Establishing, managing and controlling such teams
• Tools supporting coordination, information sharing and communication
• Task assignment and team alignment
• Motivation, culture, and human factors

Goal

The workshop targets discussion of empirically based and/or empirically validated experiences that help to increase efficiency and effectiveness of virtual teams and/or increase the quality of their outcomes.

The participants will present and discuss project experiences, best practices, tool prototypes and new approaches - in academic research and in industry.

Topics of the 1-day Workshop:

We seek to facilitate discussion of ideas around the following (but not limited to) topics:

• Challenges in establishing and managing virtual teams
• Measurement of the efficiency of virtual teams
• Social and human aspects in the context of distributed projects
• Processes and methods to operate distributed projects
• Tools to support distributed projects and virtual teams
• Project management in distributed projects of virtual teams
• Evaluation of the feasibility (e.g., by experimentation) of teaming approaches in GSD
• Industrial experiences and tool demonstrations

An explicit tool track asks vendors and academic research teams to present their products or prototypes. Live demonstrations are welcome to see how the tools can help to improve GSD projects. Please contact the organizers if you have special requirements regarding such a live demonstration.

Schedule:

[new deadline] 2013-05-06:
Deadline for paper submission to the workshop organizers

2012-05-24:
Decision of acceptance to paper authors

[new deadline] 2012-06-07:
Camera ready copies of accepted papers

August, 26th, 2013: Workshop

Paper submission:

Papers must be submitted electronically by EasyChair to the organizers in PDF format.

Accepted papers will be published in a compendium proceedings edited by IEEE CS. All papers have to be submitted as PDF files, which must conform to the two-column IEEE CS Press format (8.5" x 11", Two-Column Format) described at IEEE/CPS.

Full papers must be no longer than 6 pages including text, references, figures and appendices. Position papers and experience papers from industry must be no longer than 4 pages and outline new ideas or opportunities, present work in progress or first results that may be not fully evaluated but show trends to be discussed. Tool demonstration papers must be no longer than 4 pages and describe a tool incl. context, domain, problem, approach and first results. Tool papers explicitly address research prototypes.

Submissions that exceed the page limit or do not comply with the proceedings format will be desk rejected without review.

The results described must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. The authors of accepted submissions will be invited to present their work. Authors of tool demonstration papers have also the opportunity to prepare posters.

Outstanding submissions may be invited to submit a revised version of the paper to a special issue of the IEEE Software journal.

For questions contact: Marco Kuhrmann (see below)

Organization Committee:
Patrick Keil, TU München, keilp@in.tum.de
Marco Kuhrmann, TU München, kuhrmann@in.tum.de
Darja Smite, Blekinge Institute of Technology, darja.smite@bth.se

Program Committee:

Patrick Keil, TU München
Marco Kuhrmann, TU München
Darja Smite, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Stefan Biffl, TU Wien
Sarah Beecham, University of Limerick
Tayana Conte, Universidade Federal do Amazonas
Geir Hanssen, SINTEF Norway
Jürgen Münch, University of Helsinki