Software has become a central component in all areas of business and society. Software is used to support, operate, and control machinery, information flows, records, and processes; an increasing number of products contain embedded software; the logistics chain that delivers the product to the customer is dependent on software and databases; and, finally, even the monetary transactions for the product take place through software and databases of financial institutions. Businesses and the society as a whole run on software.

Software development is always a challenging undertaking and it requires high commitments from individuals who participate in it. Software development often involves new technology, challenging or unknown requirements, and tight schedules - making it particularly prone to several types of risk. These challenges are even more paramount in agile development and in distributed development, where the need for efficient information sharing is important, yet the distributed development makes it very difficult. This paper uses innovative learning methods to explore and to learn about these challenges and how to deal with them. The paper is partially based on presentations given by authors, but a major element in the paper is the case study that is introduced and in which will involve all the participants. The learning in the paper is strongly facilitated by participants' discussions and the insights generated in concrete problem solving situations.

The series of EDSER workshops are a unique forum to discuss and advance the state-of-the-art research and practice in economics driven software engineering. The EDSER-5 will bring together leading researchers and practitioners to provide further understanding how economic and business considerations affect - and should affect - software engineering decisions.

Explicit risk management is gaining ground in industrial software development projects. However, there are few empirical studies that investigate the transfer of explicit risk management into industry, the adequacy of the risk management approaches to the constraints of industrial contexts, or their cost-benefit. This paper presents results from a case study that introduced a systematic risk management method, namely the Riskit method, into a large German telecommunication company. The objective of the case study was (1) to analyze the usefulness and adequacy of the Riskit method and (2) to analyze the cost-benefit of the Riskit method in this industrial context. The results of (1) also aimed at improvement and customization of the Riskit method. Moreover, we compare our findings with results of previous case studies to obtain more generalized conclusions on the Riskit method. Our results showed that the Riskit method is practical, adds value to the project, and that its key concepts are understood and usable in practice. Additionally, many lessons learned are reported that are useful for the general audience who wants to transfer risk management into new projects.

No abstract available.

Any software development project requires commitments from its participants. These commitments can include money, resources, deadlines, and specified functionality for the end product. The authors have developed a framework and a set of guidelines to support the specification of such commitments. They have evaluated the framework empirically in a series of case studies. The studies indicated that the framework addresses commitment specification issues that are normally not covered in project contracts and that the specification framework was considered beneficial by project representatives.

This paper describes experiences from two organizations that have used the Riskit method for risk management in their software projects. This paper presents the Riskit method, the organizations involved, case study designs, and findings from case studies. We focus on the experiences and insights gained through the application of the method in industrial context and propose some general conclusions based on the case studies.