Journal of Systems and Software - Elsevier
Special Issue on TECHNICAL DEBT IN SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

AGENDA

- 31 May 2015: Full paper submission deadline
- 30 September 2015: Authors notification
- 31 December 2015: Authors revisions
- 1 March 2016: Final notification
- 1 April 2016: Final manuscript


INTRODUCTION

Technical Debt (TD) is a state of a software-intensive system, where the result of past decisions negatively affect its future. The TD metaphor provides a new way to talk about, manage, measure, and eventually balance short-term versus long-term benefits (e.g., time-to-market vs. maintainability). The concept of TD has proven useful, and large organizations have explicitly introduced it in some form or another in their processes, as something to identify, value, and take into consideration when developing software-intensive systems.

This special issue seeks solid scientific contributions and industrial experience reports in any of the following areas:
- TD management activities (e.g., identification, measurement, prioritization, payment, and monitoring)
- Estimating the consequences of TD
- Economic models for managing TD
- Tool support for managing TD
- TD in different software artifacts (e.g. architecture, requirements)
- TD in different lifecycle development phases (e.g., release planning).
- Novel understandings of the TD metaphor

Note that the Journal of Systems and Software seeks to bridge theory and practice. Both theoretical and practical articles are encouraged. However, theoretical articles must include some empirical evaluation, practical demonstration, or substantive discussion of the practical application of the proposed idea. Articles reporting industrial empirical studies are welcome. Tutorial articles describing established techniques should not be accepted.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

All submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors as published in the journal website at
http://ees.elsevier.com/jss/. Authors should select SI:TDS, from the "Choose Article Type" pull-down menu during the submission process. All contributions must not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. A submission extended from a previous conference version has to contain at least 30% new material. Authors are requested to attach to the submitted paper their relevant, previously published articles and a summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal version.


GUEST EDITORS

- Davide Falessi, Cal Poly, USA - dfalessi@calpoly.edu
- Philippe Kruchten, University of British Columbia, Canada - pbk@ece.ubc.ca
- Paris Avgeriou, University of Groningen, Nederlands - paris@cs.rug.nl