WETICE 2004 ECE Workshop - Final Report

A summary of the fifth Evaluating Collaborative Enterprises (ECE) workshop which ran on June 14th at University of Modena, Italy. The overall theme of the workshop this year was evaluation within the software lifecyle rather than as a separate activity. Each of the five papers touched on this subject and the subsequent winner of Best Paper covered it thoroughly. Concerns about the level of interactivity within the workshop and WETICE itself prompted a format change to "paired-paper" sessions with plenty of discussion time. Several outstanding issus were identified during the discussion, including development of "evaluation components" alongside software components, the need to convince managers of the business case for evaluation and meta-evaluation of popular techniques with a view to avoiding studies that select inappropriate techniques or rely too heavily on one type of technique.