Theme & Goals

Software is playing a crucial role in modern societies. Not only do people rely on it for their daily operations or business, but for their lives as well. For this reason, correct and consistent behaviour of software systems is a fundamental part of end user expectations. Additionally, businesses require cost-effective production, maintenance, and operation of their systems. Thus, the demand for good quality software is increasing and is setting it as a differentiator for the success or failure of a software product. In fact, high quality software is becoming not just a competitive advantage but a necessary factor for companies to be successful.

The main question that arises now is how quality is measured. What, where and when we assess and assure quality, are still open issues. Many views have been expressed about software quality attributes, including maintainability, evolvability, portability, robustness, reliability, usability, and efficiency. These have been formulated in standards such as ISO/IEC-9126 and CMMI. However, the debate about quality and maintainability between software producers, vendors and users is ongoing, while organizations need the ability to evaluate the software systems that they use or develop from multiple angles.

So, is "Software quality in the eye of the beholder"? This workshop session aims at feeding into this debate by establishing what the state of the practice and the way forward is.
Topics

We are looking for research and empirical contributions on:

* Software quality attributes
* Software measurement
* Software maintainability
* Software quality assessment: practice and automation
* Software evolution
* Software quality standards
* Software quality certification

Intended audience

In this session, the key concept and aim is at giving the opportunity to researchers to present their original work and to practitioners to relate their experiences on issues pertaining to system quality and maintainability and how to bridge the gap between end user expectations, business requirements, vendor performance, and engineering contraints. There are no restrictions regarding the background of the participants. Both researchers and practitioners are welcomed.
Format

The workshop will consist of presentations of accepted papers and one or more invited talks. There will be ample time for discussion, and a highly interactive closing discussion will be prepared and facilitated by the session chairs.
Paper submission & publication

We solicit short position papers or long papers with a maximum length of 10 pages. All accepted workshop papers will be edited and bound together into an informal proceedings volume, which will only be distributed to the workshop attendees. After the workshop, all authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit a final version of the paper for formal publication.
Previous editions

* SQM 2009 http://www.swerl.tudelft.nl/sqm2009
* SQM 2008 (website no longer available)
* SQM 2007 http://www.ru5.cti.gr/SQM07/

Chairs

* Yiannis Kanellopoulos
Software Improvement Group, The Netherlands
* Rudolf Ferenc
University of Szeged, Hungary
* José Pedro Correia (publicity chair)
Software Improvement Group, The Netherlands

Program Committee

* Danilo Caivano, Università di Bari, Italy
* Pontus Johnson, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
* Carl Worms, Credit Suisse, Switzerland
* Robert Baggen, TÜV Informationstechnik (TÜViT), Germany
* Florian Deissenboeck, Technische Universität München, Germany
* Christos Tjortjis, University of Ioannina, Greece
* Joost Visser, Software Improvement Group, The Netherlands
* Alexandros Chatzigeorgiou, University of Macedonia, Greece
* Jesus M. Gonzalez Barahona, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
* Vasile Rus, University of Memphis, USA
* Radu Marinescu, Universitatea "Politehnica" din Timişoara, Romania
* Arpad Beszedes, University of Szeged, Hungary