8th International Workshop on Software-intensive Business (IWSiB 2025)

Software-producing organizations face the challenges of changing demands, rapidly evolving technology, and an overall environmental dynamism in which their products, services, and organization need to operate. These challenges pose interesting and significant research problems that cannot be tackled by engineering or business disciplines alone. The International Workshop on Software-intensive Business (IWSiB) brings together different research communities working on topics related to software-intensive business that requires cross-community collaborations. The workshop aims to bridge the gap between software engineering and business research. It is expected to continue the development of the community and its research topics, including emerging trends for software-intensive businesses, mapping challenges and best practices in the industry, and proposing new avenues for research and practice.

The year of 2025 marks the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, in which we have witnessed how the emergence of several technologies, such as the Internet and smartphones, revolutionized software-intensive businesses. Recently, other technologies are emerging and reaching the market, such as generative AI, quantum computing, and 6G. The theme of the 8th IWSiB will be forecasting software-intensive businesses in 2050 with the maturation of these technologies. The workshop will be a mix of research work and industry experience presentations, interactive discussions, and group activities to maximize the potential synergy among the participants from different research and industry backgrounds.

Call for papers

In 2025, a quarter of the 21st century will be history and the world, at least technologically, has drastically changed. E-commerce, social networks, and mobile apps are just some artifacts that are essential today but were still in early development in the beginning of the century. These services were not only enabled but also drove the fast technological development in this period with the Internet, 3G/4G, cloud computing, just to name a few. It is clear then that business and technological development go hand-by-hand to deliver the most value for humanity. Currently, we observe the emergence and development of a new generation of disruptive technologies, such as generative AI, quantum computing, 6G and beyond, and it is essential to wonder where they will take us in 2050, after another quarter of a century, also considering particular challenges, such as sustainability and ethics. The 8th International Workshop on Software-intensive Business (IWSiB 2025): An Agenda for 2050 aims to bring together different research communities working on topics relevant to software-intensive business, to jointly investigate these challenges, and to bridge the gap between different research communities. The workshop is expected to spread knowledge through vivid discussions about contemporary issues and exchange information and experiences. As such, the workshop seeks to improve research contributions through swift feedback from the community, and to develop new projects between researchers and practitioners. To this end, the workshop will be a mix of research work, interactive discussions and group activities, to maximize the potential synergy among the participants from different research fields and industry.

Submission Guidelines & Themes

IWSiB seeks submissions describing novel research and emerging ideas. We are interested in studies describing original and unpublished results in the field of software-intensive business. The focus of the workshop is on new promising ideas and therefore work-in-progress reports are welcome to ignite discussion in the workshop. The paper length should not exceed 8 pages for research papers and 4 pages for industry reports or position papers. Topics of interest include, but are not limited, to the following aspects of software-intensive business:

• Software product management (e.g., strategy, planning, pricing)
• Software ecosystem (e.g., engineering ecosystems, analysis of - ecosystem data, modeling of ecosystem structure and behavior, management of developer ecosystems and platforms)
• Continuous practices (e.g., experimentation, innovation, improvement)
• Agile & lean projects & portfolio (e.g., methods & practices, management and organizing, behavioral and cognitive factors)
• Organizational management (e.g., managing technical and social debt, integrating product and business development)
• Software startups (e.g., scaling, pivoting, business models)
• Software platform (e.g., orchestration, governance, architecture, evolution and lifecycle)
• Software engineering economics (e.g., in engineering of software or in the software industry)
• Emerging trends and research areas (e.g., remote work, deep learning, AI ethics, digital twins, management of human-AI symbiosis, etc.)

Guidelines

Research papers must have a maximum length of 8 pages. Industry reports or positions papers are limited to 4 pages. It is not possible to pay for extra pages. There is no limit on the number of submissions an author may submit, but authors are advised to focus on quality rather than on quantity. We will follow a double-blind process, i.e., it is mandatory to anonymize the submission. The workshop papers will be published by the IEEE. Therefore, submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options). Submissions must follow the latest “IEEE Submission and Peer Review Policy” and “ACM Policy on Authorship” (with associated FAQ, which includes a policy regarding the use of generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT.

The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available by IEEE. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2025. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Papers must be submitted electronically via by the defined deadline (see above) on the link: https://iwsib25.hotcrp.com/