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Bridging the Gaps II: Bridging the Gaps Between
Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction

http://www.se-hci.org/bridging/

International Conference on Software Engineering 2004
http://conferences.iee.org/icse2004/

May 23-28, 2003 Edinburgh, Scotland

The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) being the premier software engineering conference presents an unparalleled opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and educators to discuss the shared trends and concerns. In the case of this workshop, we are interested in the relationships between the field of software engineering (SE) and the field of human-computer interaction (HCI).

This is the second annual SE-HCI workshop at ICSE, and the fifth in a series of workshops over the past two years--at ICSE, CHI, and INTERACT--aimed at bringing together the Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction communities for research, discussion, and planning.

Goal
Almost half of software in systems being developed today and thirty-seven to fifty percent of efforts throughout the software life cycle are related to the system's user interface. For this reason problems and methods from the field of human-computer interaction affect the overall process of software engineering tremendously, and vice versa. Yet despite these powerful reasons to practice and apply effective SE and HCI method there still exist major gaps of understanding both between suggested practice and how software is actually developed in industry, and between the best practices of each of the fields. The standard curricula for each field makes little if any reference to the other field and certainly does not teach how to interact with the other field. There are major gaps of communication between the HCI and SE fields: the architectures, processes, methods and vocabulary being used in each community are often foreign to the other community. As a result, product quality is not as high as it could be, and (avoidable) re-work is frequently necessary. The theme of this workshop is to bring together practitioners and academics in the two fields in an attempt to enumerate and understand these gaps of understanding and communication, with an eventual goal of proposing practical ways-shared processes, shared architectures, shared notations, etc.-to bridge these gaps.

Scope
The focus areas of the workshop will be aimed at: increasing awareness of the issues in the world at large; designing joint or related curricula; creating unified tools, methods, and processes; and influencing regulations and/or conventions of practice. The tangible results of the workshop will be a practical program of education, research, and public relations focused on changing the way that people think about these two fields, and the way that the fields are actually practiced.

Participation/Submission
Those interested in attending should submit a position paper (in Adobe PDF format) via the CyberChair web site:
http://icse.acm.org/sehcipapers/submit/
Your paper must conform to the ICSE proceedings publication format and must not exceed eight pages, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. Additional details are available at:
http://conferences.iee.org/icse2004/

This paper should include some summary of your experiences with SE and HCI, and your opinions on how the interaction among the groups can be improved. Nascent research contributions are acceptable, but not mandatory.

Last updated January 27, 2004