Second International Workshop on Properties of Software Engineering
Research (PROPSER)
In Conjunction with The International Conference on Evaluation and
Assessment in Software Engineering EASE 2022
(https://conf.researchr.org/home/ease-2022)
Gothenburg, Sweden
June 13-15, 2022
(http://propser.ipd.kit.edu/home/)

The Second International Workshop on Properties of Software Engineering
Research and their Systematic Documentation and Evaluation (PROPSER)
aims to bring together researchers at various points in their career and
practitioners alike, for discussing the systematic description and
evaluation of software engineering research and their documentation.

The extent of software engineering research is rapidly growing and still
needs to be demand-driven searched, to be understood and evaluated by
researchers and practitioners. Researchers need to understand how to
present their work, how to evaluate the work by other researchers in
peer reviews and to build their own research on top. Practitioners need
to understand how to judge suitability and relevance for their own
projects.

The workshop is motivated by two observations:

(i)writing and reviewing software engineering research results is often
hindered by the lack of a community understanding what are important
questions (hypotheses) to validate research and which methods are
suitable, appropriate and needed for demonstrating evidence.

(ii)retrieving research results just through syntactical terms of the
paper title (or even abstract) is often very hard, and, as a
consequence, comprehensively relating research results to each other in
terms of support, strengthening or contradiction is rarely done.

Thus, this workshop aims to consider insights, new proposals and open
questions on (i) planning and conducting research; (ii) writing research
papers; (iii) reviewing research papers; (iv) communicating research and
(v) effectively finding research results in a digital world.

Therefore, in PROPSER we want to discuss in particular:

-properties for describing software engineering research, such as
relevance, evidence, applicability, appropriateness, etc;
-general patterns for suitable empirical validations of research results
and hypotheses;
-suitable classifications of software engineering research, beyond
established subject categories;
-experiences, rules or guidelines, on how to decide on suitable
validation questions and subsequently suitable empirical methods;
-managing and organising research knowledge at a finer grain than paper
citations;
-methods for evaluating the impact of research on software engineering
practice.

The workshop aims to discuss these subjects as such, it is not meant to
be a platform for original research results in a specific software
engineering topic. Therefore, we intentionally do not require original
new ideas to be submitted. Of course, for inclusion in the proceedings a
paper should be original text.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
Topics of interest of the proposed workshop include, but are not limited
to, the following themes:

-properties for describing software engineering research, such as
relevance, evidence, applicability, appropriateness, etc.
-general patterns for suitable empirical validations of research results
and hypotheses.
-suitable classifications of software engineering research, beyond
established subject categories.
-experiences, rules or guidelines, on how to decide on suitable
validation methods depending on properties of the research.
-managing and organizing research knowledge more fine grained than paper
citations.

SUBMISSION
Concretely, we invite three types of submissions:

-taxonomy and overview papers (up to 8 pages): papers presenting or
surveying classifications of software engineering subjects, empirical
methods, areas of software applications, etc.; including hypotheses
about relationships between such categories (e.g., "contributions of
type X should be validated with method Y.").
-open question papers (up to 6 pages): papers describing ongoing
research that has unsolved questions regarding how to demonstrate the
validity and relevance of the work.
-proposal-for-solution papers (up to 6 pages): papers describing
sketches or solutions to address one or several of the mentioned topics.

Note, that the "open question papers" are different from the commonly
used format of research result submissions (like: "motivation, idea,
foundations, approach, state of the art, validation, conclusion"). Of
course, any paper of that format could be presented as an open question
paper (keeping the first parts, but substituting the validation with
open questions accordingly). But we also encourage the submission of
papers on ongoing research, where validation is indeed open. Please
note, that we intentionally to not require original new work to be
submitted, as the workshop does not aim to be a platform for original
research results in a specific software engineering subject. In fact,
the workshop wants to discuss the above described subjects concerning
the organisation, validation and documentation of software engineering
research as such. Papers will be reviewed with respect of their rigor of
argumentation, potential to spark interesting discussions during the
workshop regarding the above mentioned topics.

Submissions are done via the Easychair site of EASE.

PUBLICATION
All accepted papers will be published at ACM EASE 2022 conference
companion proceedings.

IMPORTANT DATES
The deadlines and important dates for the submissions are as follows:

Paper submission: Feb. 28, 2022
Author notification: March 28th, 2022
Camera-ready: April 25th, 2022
Workshop: June TBA, 2022

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
Ralf Reussner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) / FZI – IT
Research Centre, Germany (main contact)
Anne Koziolek, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany
Francesca Lonetti, Institute of Information Science and Technologies
"Alessandro Faedo" (ISTI-CNR), Italy

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Antonia Bertolino, ISTI-CNR, Italy
Robert Feldt, Chalmers University of Technology and Blekinge Institute
of Technology, Sweden
Lutz Prechelt, FU Berlin, Germany
Walter Tichy, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany
Marco Torchiano, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
.....