IET Software is seeking original and unpublished papers for a special issue titled "Empirical Approaches to Evaluation and Assessments in Software Engineering" to be published in June 2009. Software engineers find that experiments are difficult to perform. Furthermore, no experiment can be considered flawless no matter how well conducted. This special issue intends addressing this problem by motivating and encouraging software engineers to undertake more empirical studies along with discussing practical and methodological issues associated with evaluation
The aim of this special issue is to bring together researchers to share recent results on various aspects of empirical software engineering and evaluation studies. The special issue will foster further research, thereby leading to the emergence of creative ideas and practical solutions. Some specific topics of interest are, but are not limited to:

experiments (laboratory and field)
replications of empirical studies
case studies
surveys
observational studies
field studies
action research
evaluation methodology
systematic reviews and meta-analysis

Guest Editors:
Giuseppe Visaggio Maria Teresa Baldassarre Stephen Linkman
Serlab Serlab Keele University
Dipartimento di Informatica Dipartimento di Informatica Staffordshire
Universita degli Studi Universita degli Studi di Bari UK
di Bari, Italy Italy

To submit a paper please go to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/iet-sen and follow link to "submit". Please ensure you note that the paper is for the Special Issue.

Important dates:

Manuscript submission: October 30, 2008
First Decision to Authors: January 30, 2009
Revision due: February 28, 2009
Re-revision (if necessary): March 15, 2009
Final Decision: April 1, 2009
Publication of issue: June 2009