OOPSLA 06 Workshop: Escaped from the Lab: Software Practices in Large Organizations

Workshop date:  Monday October 23, 8:30am-5:00pm
Location:  OOPSLA '06 Conference in Portland, Oregon

Website Contents

Workshop Overview

This is the website for the proposed OOPSLA workshop on software product development issues.

What are some of the common practices for taking new ideas and converting them into products?

An important dynamic in large organizations: one part of the organization over-commits (promises the earth, moon, and stars), and another part of the organization is forced to deliver. The extravagant promise of the Powerpoint presentation is converted into the trail of tears of the Gantt chart.

The grandiose project was originally supposed to be feasible. There were some small technology trials that proved out the basic ideas for low-volume transaction rates and simplified user interfaces. The product was supposed to be delivered in record time because of high rates of software reuse. So what went wrong?

One thing that compounds this effect: only a small fraction of the people working on software are actually in firms that consider themselves to be in the software business. This may lead a team to make inadequate choices of practices and approaches for the process of turning new ideas into products.

This workshop explored the intersection of object oriented technology, high reliability and performance requirements, large organizations, and conflicts in the software development process. Some questions we considered include:

The workshop was an exploration of both traditional and modern approaches to creating reliable software and improving the reliability of existing software.

Some subjects that were considered in the course of this workshop:


Are you interested in joining the dialog on the issues of bringing research into practice?  Here is how you can join the workshop:

  1. Contact one of the workshop organizers listed below.
  2. Prepare a one-page "position paper" -- containing your ideas, questions, and experiences.  Send your position paper to mancl - AT - lucent.com.  Position papers are due by September 1, 2006.
  3. You will receive notification of your acceptance into the workshop by September 8.

The workshop was organized as a set of interactive brainstorming and discussion sessions.  The workshop participants prepared a poster that was presented at the OOPSLA poster session on Monday afternoon.

Workshop committee:

Position Papers

The following links are the "position papers" that were written by some of the workshop participants:


Last modified: October 25, 2006