Quality Aspects in Software Engineering using Evidence-Based Approaches

Track Committee

Chair: Sheila Reinehr, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Brazil

Co-Chair: Fernando Brito e Abreu, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal

Program Committee:

Emilia Mendes, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden

Guilherme Horta Travassos, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Universitá degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy

Michael Felderer, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Miguel Goulão, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Rudolf Ramler, Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria

Stefan Wagner, Institut für Softwaretechnologie, Germany

Tayana Conte, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Call for papers:

Our society is more dependent than ever on the quality of the software that makes it run. The company where we work, our trips, our telecommunications, our savings, our healthcare, our national security and even our professional and social circles depend on it. Software is the core of contemporary systems and its quality has then been, for the past decades, a recurrent topic that brought into existence many books, journals, standards, certification initiatives, conferences, interest groups, projects, tools, consulting companies, university courses and training initiatives.

Quality is a crosscutting concern in the Software and Systems Engineering bodies of knowledge and encompasses product, processes and systems aspects, as it can be noticed in SEBoK 1.2 and SWEBOK V.3. Quality is a concern in most chapters, either in system and software requirements, design, construction, testing or maintenance. Software Quality Engineering has become a de facto profession, as evidenced by ASQ’s certification scheme and associated body of knowledge.

Software Engineering is a bubbling pot where a large community of researchers and practitioners pours new methods, techniques and tools at a great pace, most often with a final claim on system and software quality improvement. Unfortunately, not so often, are those new proposals presented along with some evidence of their “goodness”. Despite the awareness of our community as a whole, we also need to increase substantially the number of primary and secondary studies checking the conformance of software quality concerned with the claims produced by other researchers (i.e. replication studies) or investigating new quality features regarding software systems.

This thematic track will be a forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators that apply primary and secondary studies strategies for assessing, surveying and improving software quality. We aim at fostering the exchange of ideas that will help exploring, understanding, and modeling the software quality phenomena based on evidence. We look for studies on software quality that may range from primary (from case studies to controlled experiments, either applying quantitative or qualitative techniques) to secondary (from mapping studies to [quasi] systematic reviews, including meta-analysis or aggregation when possible). Novel and replication studies regarding software quality will be both welcomed. Submitted papers should provide an explicit description of the empirical strategy that was applied. We encourage the use of structured abstracts as suggested by the Information and Software Technology Journal.

Submission process:

Authors should submit to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=quatic2016 a PDF version of their paper. Full Papers must be in CPS format and not exceed 6 pages, including figures, references, and appendices. Work In Progress (WIP) works with relevant preliminary results are limited to 3 pages. Submissions must be original and will be reviewed by the Track Program Committee. Accepted papers will be included in the electronic proceedings of QUATIC’2016 published by Conference Publishing Services (CPS), submitted for archiving in Xplore and CSDL, and submitted for indexing in ISI Web of Science, SCOPUS, ACM Portal, DBLP and DOI System, subject to one of the authors registering for the conference. The authors of the best papers of this thematic track will be invited to submit extended versions to the main track of the conference.

Important dates:

    • Paper submission: Sunday, April 17, May 15, 2016

    • Author's notifications: Sunday, May 15, June 12, 2016

    • Camera ready submission: Sunday, June 19, June 26, 2016

About the Track Chairs:

Fernando Brito e Abreu is associate professor at the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies of the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) and a senior researcher at ISTAR-IUL. He holds a PhD on Computer Science from IST (Lisbon Technical University). He leads the QUASAR research group that includes researchers and graduate students from both FCT/UNL and ISCTE-IUL. He is associate editor of the Software Quality Professional journal from the American Society for Quality. Further information at https://ciencia.iscte-iul.pt/public/person/fba

Previous Edition:

See details of the QUATIC 2014 edition of this track.

Sheila Reinehr has a PhD in Engineering , a MSc in Informatics and a BSC in Mechanical Engineering. She is currently an associate professor and researcher at the Graduate Program on Informatics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, a private university in Brasil. Her main research interests rely on software engineering, more specifically on software quality, software and services process improvement, agile methodologies, project and portfolio management, organizational learning and the use of evidence based approaches to investigate advances in software engineering. She is a practitioner of SPI initiatives, acting as SPI consultant and SPI experienced lead appraiser, officially certified by SOFTEX. She holds PMP, ITIL and SCRUM certifications.