Call for Papers
Special Issue on Long Term Evolution of Software Systems

International Journal
Automated Software Engineering


Editor-in-Chief:

Dr. Robert J. Hall AT & T Research

Guest Editors:

Prof. Michael Goedicke (paluno, The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany)
Prof. Jeff Kramer (Imperial College London, UK)


Software systems underpin almost every aspect of our lives. In order to take advantage of new and emerging opportunities, and to address changes in context, we need to address the changing needs of customers and users as well as environmental changes and new features and services. Software is therefore expected to support a degree of flexibility, which presents a major challenge to requirements engineers, software developers and maintenance engineers. Amazon, for example, release on average a new version of their service every 11 seconds!

The effect of such a fast pace of change and the long expected lifetime is often that a software system soon shows signs of aging. This aging is not through wear and tear but rather by repeated modification and maintenance to accommodate the required changes. Change is often rushed and without the benefit of the quality control and management in place during the original development. In addition, the implementation and the high level design and requirements artifacts are soon inconsistent.

How can we sustain such a pace of change while maintaining the quality of our software, especially as software systems are generally expected to remain in operation for decades?

To address these challenges all areas of software development need to be considered and their respective contributions evaluated. New foundations, methods, and tools are needed to be able to develop “forever young software,” which not only maintains the software systems’ initial functionality and quality, but also supports continuous improvement and adaptation to meet new needs and a changing environment during its lifetime.
Original contributions in this research area are invited which address ways in which automation can be brought to bear on these issues, including but not limited to

* new modeling approaches and tools for model based development, deployment, and operation of large software systems,
* new ways to document implementations and more abstract aspects of software systems in a sustainable way for long term evolution,
* methods and tools for the monitoring and assessment of the operation of a software system during its lifetime
* . . .


Important dates:

Submission due: 1 Nov 2014
First round review notifications: 28 Feb 2015
Revised Versions Due: 30 April 2015

Contact:
Michael.Goedicke@paluno.uni-due.de
See also
www.s3.uni-due.de/SIJASE

For more information on the journal see http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10515

Submit your contribution here: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ause/ there login as author and choose Article Type: “S.I. Long Term Evolution of Software Systems”