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Call for Systems

Science of Computer Programming

Fifth special issue on Experimental Software and Toolkits (EST)
http://www.win.tue.nl/~mvdbrand/SCP-EST/
Deadline for submissions: November 2th, 2012

In cooperation with:
Academics Modelling with Eclipse Workshop - ECMFA 2012
http://www.acme-workshop.org/

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THE IDEA IN A NUTSHELL: REPRODUCIBILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY

The journal "Science of Computer Programming" of Elsevier
Science has a long history of publishing high-quality articles
on programming and software. The idea of this special issue on
Experimental Software and Toolkits (EST) is to allow academic
software developers to publish the software system they
developed together with a paper. We hope this will help the
academic software development community to find a wider audience
for their work. Moreover, by enhancing the accessibility and the
reproducibility of results, we hope to help to encourage a wider
application and adoption of experimental software.

The first call for systems resulted in the special issue
published as Volume 69, Numbers 1-3 of Science of Computer
Programming. The second issue was published as special issue as
Volume 72, Numbers 1-2 of Science of Computer Programming. The
third issue was in cooperation with WASDeTT2008 and was published
as third special issue as Volume 75, Number 4 of Science of
Computer Programming. The fourth issue was in cooperation with
WaSDETT 2010 and will be published later this year. Given the
success of these special issues, a fifth special issue is
planned, the deadline for submitting systems is the November 2th,
2012.

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AIM AND SCOPE

Academic software development may involve the development of huge
software systems in order to perform all kinds of experiments.
This can be compared with huge experiments in physics or
chemistry. The focus of researchers developing such experimental
software systems is mainly on software development. The software
developer has some idea, algorithmic or functional, and in order
to prove his or her idea software is adapted or newly developed.
Some of these systems are distributed to different researchers
and may become very popular in the community. The software
development of these systems is almost always in conflict with
papers that are to be written. If the users community grows and
the requests for enhancements and improvements increases, the
effort to maintain the system may become overwhelming.

This EST initiative is focussed on the creation of a forum where
beside the paper the software system itself is published. Two
obvious questions arise here:

* What is the difference between this initiative and the open
source facilities like SourceForge? The most important and
challenging difference is that the software is reviewed. A
number of independent referees will review both the system and
the system description paper and will give a verdict.

* What is the difference with tool demonstrations at conferences
and workshops? The difference is that at conferences tool
demonstrations are accepted based on the tool demonstration
only, the referee has no opportunity to install and use the
system or have a look at the code.

We want to invite authors to submit software systems together
with a paper. For this special issue we solicit submissions about
modelling tools which have been conceived to support the
application of MDE in the development of software systems. We
want to go one step further than the tool demonstrations at the
various conferences, because the reviewers are invited to install
and test the submitted systems. The software systems is reviewed
on various aspects:

* ease of installation,
* quality of (user) documentation,
* ease of usage, and
* applicability and relevance to the intended domain, in this
case the area of MDE.

The major improvement over the conference and workshop tool
demonstration is that a broader audience is able to download,
install, and use the system (in this respect we are also
interested in Eclipse plug-ins); Elsevier will publish the
software system as well.


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GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

In order to submit a software system the author has to produce a
tool description paper, we expect the size and quality of a
research paper but the topic is on the tool, its usability,
installation, and optionally a few words on tool building issues.
The size of the tool description paper is at least 12 pages. The
main goal of the paper is to introduce the tool, the application
domain of the tool and to give a comparison with relevant related
tools and systems. Moreover, relevant theory should concisely be
addressed.

The requirements of the software system itself:

* Installation documentation.
* The source files and an installation script or procedure, it
is possible to provide the binaries as well, but the original
source files are required for code inspection.
* A number of example applications.
* User documentation.


INSTRUCTIONS

The submission deadline is November 2th, 2012. Authors are
requested to submit their system and corresponding paper
electronically to EES in PDF format. We encourage the use of the
Elsevier style file for LaTeX (see
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/latex). To ensure that all
manuscripts are correctly identified for inclusion into the
special issue you are editing, it is important that authors
select “SI: EST5” when they reach the "Article Type" step in the
submission process.


COPYRIGHT

The copyright of the articles is held, except where noted, by
Elsevier Science. Copyright as well as other proprietary rights
in the source code are held by the authors. By submitting the
code along with the article, the authors have agreed to permit
the readers of Science of Computer Programming the right to use
the algorithms for personal and professional research use, but
not for any further redistribution, further sub-licensing, or
commercial use. All rights are otherwise reserved. Authors are
thus free to distribute the published version of the source code
via other media as well as to develop and distribute new versions
of the source code.

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GUEST EDITORS

Mark van den Brand
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Eindhoven University of Technical, The Netherlands
e-mail: m.g.j.v.d.brand@tue.nl
http://www.win.tue.nl/~mvdbrand/

Davide Di Ruscio
Dipartimento di Informatica
Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, Italy
e-mail: davide.diruscio@univaq.it
http://www.di.univaq.it/diruscio

Dimitris Kolovos
Department of Computer Science
University of York, UK
e-mail: dimitris.kolovos@york.ac.uk
http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~dkolovos

Louis Rose
Department of Computer Science
University of York, UK
e-mail: louis@cs.york.ac.uk
http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~louis

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