Software development is a human activity. This year’s theme is about the adoption of a human-centered approach to software development. The inclusion of humans and their social context in the development support can influence software engineering at large. But most current software development practices in industry are not rooted in such a human-centered approach.

Software development and its interface presented to the engineer is mostly defined by Integrated Development Environments and their way of dealing with software data. Recent products such as IBM’s Rational Team Concert or Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System have opened up a new way of interrelating software work items such as code, bugs, assignments, people, and roles. Still the innovation is driven by a repository view of what data is available currently.

If we consider software development from another perspective, the human-oriented one, it becomes clear that we have not really addressed the issue of how people do collaborate in a large software development endeavor and which techniques, tools and mechanisms they really need to be effective.

The goal of this year’s CHOOSE Forum is to discuss the potential tools, techniques, and mechanisms that could potentially change the way we produce software and make it more effective by building human-centered means of development.