Special Issue of Automated Software Engineering journal

"Innovative Tools for Automated Software Engineering"


Submissions due: 31st March 2012


Guest Editors

John Grundy, Swinburne University of Technology
John Hosking, Australian National University & University of Auckland


Background

By definition, "automated" software engineering needs the support of
automation - tools - in order to be effective (or even possible). Many,
many tools have been developed to support automation, in narrow domains
and in broad. These range from AI toolkits, theorem provers and model
checkers; requirements, design, coding and testing support tools;
various configuration management, process enactment and project
management support tools; to code generators, code analysis,
visualisation, refactoring and reverse engineering tools.


Rationale for this Special Issue

To continue to advance the field in Automated Software Engineering, good
automation-supporting tools need to be developed and deployed, along
with new and improved ASE techniques. Such tools are usually themselves
extremely complex engineered software artifacts. ASE tools are
challenging to design, to build, to scale, to make robust and to
integrate and evolve. We are interested in new directions in tool
engineering and deployment: new approaches in building tools, scaling
and deploying tools, new domains or ways in which to apply tools, and
synthesis of tools and techniques.


Submission Topics

We seek substantial, archival contributions to the ASE literature;
submissions will be reviewed according to the Journal's usual high
quality standards. We would like to publish a range of quality papers
focusing on innovative aspects of ASE tools. The theme of this special
issue is deliberately broad and encompasses:

* new approaches to engineering innovative ASE tools
* ASE tools for theorem proving, model checking and other complex model
analysis
* ASE tools for data mining, searching and other knowledge-intensive ASE
techniques
* ASE tools for requirements engineering
* ASE tools for model construction including requirements, design,
coding, or combinations
* ASE tools for testing
* ASE tools for reverse engineering, refactoring, visualisation of
models and/or code
* ASE tools for development process support including process, project
and configuration management
* architecting ASE tools including issues of scaling, robustness,
reliability, integration
* evaluating ASE tools including issues of usability, performance,
effectiveness
* ASE tools applied to new or emerging domains e.g. health IT,
bio-informatics, embedded systems, communications systems, mobile devices
* industrial case studies and/or real-world experiences deploying ASE tools


The focus of papers should be on the tool aspect, not the technique
aspect. Journal readers should be able to learn important lessons about
tool innovation in the target tool domain(s).

We expect evaluation may be holistic: some tools evaluated by their
performance, scaling to large models, the range of support features
offered or handling of complexity. Others may be evaluated on their
support for software engineers including tool usability, expressiveness,
effectiveness, differentiation from other tools, and integration with
other tools.

Negative result papers are welcome so long as clear lessons for future
ASE tool engineering and deployment are demonstrated, not just "we had a
good tool idea but it didn't work".


Please submit full papers via:

http://ause.edmgr.com/


by 31st March 2012.