Call for Papers

 

Software Evolution: Maintaining Stakeholders’ Satisfaction in a Changing World

Submission Deadline: Closed
Publication: July/August 2010

Companies, governments, and open source communities spend a great deal of resources on a continual basis to fix, adapt, and enhance their software systems. The ability to evolve software rapidly and reliably represents a major challenge in software engineering. This special issue will showcase recent technologies, methodologies, empirical results, and practical experiences that can help to improve the quality, productivity, and timeliness of software evolution activities and, hence, to maintain and improve stakeholders' satisfaction.

We seek submissions on applications of research results, practical experiences, success stories, and lessons learned related to software evolution. These papers should offer practical and reliable insights that have been derived from, or that can be applied to, real-world software-intensive systems. Possible types of contributions include but are not limited to

  • articles describing state-of-the-art methods, models, and tools, supporting or improving software evolution (with evidence of use and study of practical impact) or bridging the gap between practice and research;
  • empirical studies in the field, addressing one or many human, technical, social, and economic issues of software evolution through qualitative and/or quantitative analyses; and
  • industrial experiences, including good practices and lessons learned on implementation and/or management of software evolution in specific contexts or domains.

Example contributions include the following:

  • presentation of a tool or technique to support software change activities;
  • evaluation of code, design, and architecture quality during software evolution and ways to prevent their decay and erosion;
  • economic models to assess software evolution research results and/or practices and to support the planning and management of software evolution;
  • good practices, based on evidence of use, in software evolution in general or in
    • parallel, distributed, and decentralized evolution (for example, across space and time),
    • domain-specific software systems (for example, consumer electronics, COTS, legacy assets, open source, Web services), or
    • addressing conflicting requirements (for example, evolvability, maintainability, security, reliability, or performance);
  • assessment of  impact and challenges of software changes, in particular refactorings and restructurings during software evolution; and
  • studies of the evolution of large software systems or systems of systems (for example, keeping entropy and complexity under control, ensuring evolvability under unexpected changes).

Manuscripts must not exceed 5,400 words, including figures and tables, which count for 200 words each. Submissions in excess of these limits may be rejected without refereeing. The articles deemed within the theme's scope will be peer-reviewed and subject to editing for magazine style, clarity, organization, and space. We reserve the right to edit the title of all submissions. Be sure to include the name of the theme, “software evolution,” when you submit.

Articles should have a practical orientation and be written in a style accessible to practitioners. Overly complex, purely research-oriented, or theoretical studies are not appropriate. Articles should be novel. IEEE Software does not republish material published previously in other venues, including other periodicals and formal conference/workshop proceedings, whether previous publication was in print or in electronic form.

Questions?

Interested authors can contact any of the guest editors with questions about appropriate content: 

For general author guidelines: www.computer.org/software/author.htm

For submission details: software@computer.org

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