Enterprises achieve business goals through engineering, delivery and support of software. Business success depends on aligning software processes and their products with business goals. However, achieving this alignment is challenging, as evidenced by decades of software products that do not achieve business goals.

Managing the alignment between enterprises and their software organizations is a long-term, complex activity. It requires surfacing and managing goals, commitments, and forms of risk in software engineering processes in the presence of uncertainty. Solutions must facilitate (a) identification of actions offering the best chances of meeting goals and commitments, (b) assessing progress towards meeting goals and commitments while projects are evolving, (c) prediction, diagnosis, and response to emergent issues, and (d) cross-organizational coordination to achieve goals, remediate problems, and produce the best results globally.

The goal of the EASE workshop is to identify and address key issues that arise in aligning software engineering approaches and objectives with the objectives of the businesses and enterprises that produce and/or and use large-scale software systems It provides a forum for researchers and practitioners to:

• Discuss key issues and impediments in achieving alignment between enterprise goals and in different contexts, including commercial, government, open source, and international.
• Understand key usage scenarios.
• Identify and plan a high-quality research agenda on enterprise-aligned software engineering.

We look forward to embarking on an important and interesting journey with you!

Lee Osterweil, Peri Tarr, Evelyn Duesterwald, Kevin Sullivan (co-organizers)