Call For Papers:

Information and Software Technology, Elsevier Special issue on visual analytics in software engineering

** Background**
In the recent years there has been a tremendous development in the area of handling large quantities of data in different aspects of software product development. One of the areas is the ability to understand the customers and collect the data from the product usage in-field; another area is the ability to use large quantities of product development data to optimise software development flows. As a community we have also made great progress in providing more data from software development systems such as source code management systems (e.g. git), defect management systems (e.g. Jira) and many more.

Based on the above two observations we could see that visual analytics in software engineering is gaining importance. The ability to quickly and accurately understand the software and its context is important for both software engineers, business analysts, software product managers and other roles involved in software development.

In this special issue we recognise the challenges of using the large quantities of data in software engineering and solicit original contributions in the area of using visual analytics in software engineering. We solicit papers which contribute to both the theory and practice of using visual analytics techniques such as software visualisation, mining data from software repositories, and supporting program/artefact comprehension.

The goal of the special issue is to provide our software engineering community with the ability to stay up-to-date in the recent developments in the area of visual analytics.

** Topics **
We solicit papers in the following topics (but not limited to the list below):
- Visualisation to support program comprehension, software testing, and debugging
- Tool support for software visual analytics
- Integration of software visualisation tools and development environments
- Cognitive theories for visual analytics and software comprehension, including experiments, empirical studies, and case studies
- Human aspects in visual analytics with application in software engineering
- Empirical evaluations of software visual analytics tools, techniques, and approaches
- Task-specific visualisation support for software engineering tasks
- Interaction techniques and algorithms for software visualisation
- Visual analytics and legal issues, such as due diligence, intellectual property, and reverse engineering
- Visualisation-based techniques in computer science and software engineering education
- Issues and case studies in the transfer of visual analytics and software comprehension technology to industry.
- Industrial experience on using software visualisation
- Innovative visualisation and visual analytics techniques for software engineering data, such as:
-- source code
-- static and dynamic dependencies
-- software evolution and repositories
-- software documentation
-- web services
-- protocol, log, and performance data
-- configuration management, DevOps, production systems
-- parallel techniques
-- database schemes
-- software security and privacy issues
-- workflow and business processes

**Important dates**
Submission deadline: 31st of May, 2017
First review: 31st of October
Notification of acceptance: 31st of January, 2018 Special issue: February 2018

** Submission information **
All submissions should follow the journal submission guidelines, including maximum length requirements and having a structured abstract.
The guidelines for authors can be found at: https://www.elsevier.com/journals/information-and-software-technology/0950-5849/guide-for-authors

The submissions can be done via the journal’s submission website: https://www.evise.com/profile/#/INFSOF/login.
When submitting, please select the following article type: “Special issue: Visual Analytics in Software Engineering”

Contact: miroslaw.staron@gu.se