Submissions due: 6 May 2022
Publication: January/February 2023
Many practices in DevOps entail reusing standard tools from software development (such as code-versioning and code-revision management) to manage what is known as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). IaC promotes concentrating knowledge and experience of infrastructures within a single commonly available, version-able, trackable, and executable source file (literally) rather than traditionally pressuring such knowledge solely on system administrators. IaC covers automations for integration (compiling, testing, etc.), deployment (host procurement and configuration), and more. An interesting challenge for software engineering research is that, like any software code artefact, IaC can be analyzed and modelled, its defects can be predicted, and its quality can be assessed and maintained–all via automated means.
This special issue aims at providing a collection of articles acting as a practical guide, entry point, and cookbook for practitioners approaching or refining the topic as well as for researchers interested to know more about the state of the art in the topic and where their next practical contribution might be laid. Topics of interest for this theme issue include, but are not limited to:
- IaC programming practices, e.g., programming model
- Reflexivity and readability
- Program understanding and auto-repair
- Design and operations patterns
- Testing and test-case generation
- Interoperability of higher-level languages
- Code transformations
- Formal models/analysis
- Static analysis
- Code or community smells elaborated in the context of IaC
- Automated completion and linting
- Recommender systems
- Constraint languages
- Distributed/decentralized models
Besides seeking regular-length articles, we also seek short experience reports from practitioners. These reports do not need to make a research contribution but should instead present the experiences of practitioners or tool developers that share their practical insights and experience related to the topic focusing on challenges faced, solutions attempted, and results obtained.
Submission Guidelines
For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the Author Information page. Please submit papers through the ScholarOne system, and be sure to select the special-issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal.
Questions?
Contact the guest editors at sw1-23@computer.org.
Guest Editors:
- Giovanni Quattrocchi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
- Damian A. Tamburri, Eindhoven University of Technology, Jheronimus Academy of Data Sciences (JADS), The Netherlands
- Orue-Echevarria Arrieta, Leire, Tecnalia Research & Innovation, Spain
