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Journal of Systems and Software:

Special Issue on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-systems-and-software/call-for-p
apers/special-issue-on-rapid-continuous-software-engineering/
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Today, software development is conducted in increasingly turbulent
business environments. Typically, fast-changing and unpredictable
markets, complex and changing customer requirements, pressures of
shorter time-to-market, and rapidly advancing information technologies
are characteristics found in most software development projects. To
address this situation, agile practices advocate flexibility,
efficiency and speed.

While many software development companies have indeed succeeded in
adopting agile practices in parts of their organization, the focus for
many organizations is predominantly at the team level. The other
functions in the organization, including customer relations, product
management, R&D management and software release, in many companies
still work in traditional slow cycles, measured in months and years.

Continuous software engineering refers to the organizational
capability to develop, release and learn from software in rapid
parallel cycles, typically hours, days or very small numbers of weeks.
This includes determining new functionality to build, prioritizing the
most important functionality, evolving and refactoring the
architecture, developing the functionality, validating it, releasing
it to customers and collecting experimental feedback from the
customers to inform the next cycle of development.

The capability to perform all these activities in rapid cycles
requires significant changes in the entire software engineering
approach, including parallelizing activities, empowering cross
functional teams to allow for rapid decision making and light weight
coordination across teams. It also requires significant technical
advances in the engineering infrastructure, including continuous
integration and deployment, collection of post-deployment product
usage data, support for running automatic live experiments to evaluate
different system alternatives, e.g., A/B testing.

You are invited to submit papers addressing contemporary issues that
enable software development companies to develop, release and learn
from software in rapid parallel cycles. We invite original, both
empirical and theoretical submissions on, but not limited to, the
following topics:

* agile practices
* relations between agile practices and the specific development
phases, e.g., requirements engineering, architectural design,
programming languages, validation and verification
* organizational aspects
* supporting tools
* application / system monitoring
* live and automatic experimentation
* learning from experimental results
* usability / human computer interaction
* software evolution
* software maintenance
* legal issues, e.g., privacy w.r.t. data collection and live
experimentation

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:RCoSE", 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.


Important dates
===============

Submission deadline: 5 January 2015


Guest Editors
=============

Dr. Matthias Tichy
Email: matthias.tichy@cse.gu.se
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Prof. Jan Bosch
Email: jan.bosch@chalmers.se
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Prof. Michael Goedicke
Email: Michael.Goedicke@paluno.uni-due.de
University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Dr. Magnus Larsson
Email: magnus.larsson@in.abb.com
Head of ABB India Development Center, Bangalore, India