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Journal of Systems and Software:

Special Issue on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering 2

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-systems-and-software/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-rapid-continuous-software-engineering-ii/
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Today, software development is conducted in increasingly turbulent
business environments. Typically, fast-changing and unpredictable
markets, complex and changing customer requirements, pressures of
shorter time-to-market, and rapidly advancing information
technologies are characteristics found in most software development
projects.

What does this mean? Consider, for example, reducing the cycle time
for a complex ERP software deployment from two weeks to one hour. In
between all the important activities occur like analyzing and
consolidating actual new requirements together with the business
people, deriving the new quality assurance measures, architecting,
implementing and deploying the new version. Is this the scenario of
modern software development of contemporary applications?

The usual answer of research to address this situation: agile
practices advocate flexibility, efficiency and speed.

It seems this is not sufficient – at least in practice. Many software
development companies have indeed succeeded in adopting agile
practices in parts of their organization, the focus for many
organizations is predominantly at the team level. The other functions
in the organization, including customer relations, product management,
R&D management and software release, in many companies still work in
traditional slow cycles, measured in months and years.

Rapid continuous software engineering refers to the organizational
capability to develop, release and learn from software in rapid
parallel cycles, typically hours, days or very small numbers of
weeks. This includes determining new functionality to build,
prioritizing the most important functionality, evolving and
refactoring the architecture, developing the functionality, validating
it, releasing it to customers and collecting experimental feedback
from the customers to inform the next cycle of development.

The capability to perform all these activities in rapid cycles
requires significant changes in the entire software engineering
approach, including parallelizing activities, empowering cross
functional teams to allow for rapid decision making and light weight
coordination across teams. It also requires significant technical
advances in the engineering infrastructure, including continuous
integration and deployment, collection of post-deployment product
usage data, support for running automatic live experiments to evaluate
different system alternatives, e.g., A/B testing.

You are invited to submit papers addressing contemporary issues that
enable software development companies to develop, release and learn
from software in rapid parallel cycles. We invite original, both
empirical and theoretical submissions on, but not limited to, the
following topics:

* agile practices
* relations between agile practices and the specific development
phases, e.g., requirements engineering, architectural design,
programming languages, validation and verification
* lean practices such as flow
* DevOps
* organizational aspects
* supporting tools
* application / system monitoring
* live and automatic experimentation
* learning from experimental results
* usability / human computer interaction
* software evolution
* software maintenance
* legal issues e.g. data collection and privacy


Submission Guidelines
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All submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors
as published in the journal website at http://ees.elsevier.com/jss/.
Authors should select "SI:RCoSE2", from the “Choose Article Type”
pull-down menu during the submission process. All contributions must
not have been previously published or be under consideration for
publication elsewhere. A submission extended from a previous
conference version has to contain at least 30% new material. Authors
are requested to attach to the submitted paper their relevant,
previously published articles and a summary document explaining the
enhancements made in the journal version.


Important dates
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Submission deadline: 1st of March 2016

Even though there is a submission deadline, the editing
process for each paper is started as soon as it is submitted.

Guest Editors
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Prof. Matthias Tichy
Email: matthias.tichy@uni-ulm.de
University of Ulm, Germany

Prof. Jan Bosch
Email: jan.bosch@chalmers.se
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Prof. Michael Goedicke
Email: Michael.Goedicke@paluno.uni-due.de
University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Prof. Brian Fitzgerald
Email: bf@lero.ie
Lero & University of Limerick, Ireland

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