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FIARS Workshop Call for papers

Fostering Industry-Academic Software Reliability Studies Co-located with ISSRE 2017, October 23-26, Toulouse, France
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***Outline***

While some academic disciplines have been highly successful in bringing academia and industry together to share (often sensitive) data in studies, the same is not necessarily true of the software engineering community generally speaking. As such, there is an opportunity in any area where software is written, used or studied to analyse, understand and disseminate best practice in fostering more industry-academic studies. The area of software reliability is a particularly interesting area because of the often sensitive nature of data shared in such studies.

The FIARS workshop will be geared towards experience: In other words, what lessons can be learnt from current software-related data studies in terms of barriers and impediments? What are the key issues in sharing data between academia and industry? What is best practice in collaborative studies and, most importantly, what can be done to improve and encourage more collaboration? The sole aim of the FIARS Workshop is to bring academics and practitioners together specifically to discuss these issues. But this is not its only remit. A key outcome of FIARS will be to initiate and build upon a network of interested academics and practitioners to complement work already being done by the organisers in this area (see: www.fiarnet.org). We do not see FIARS as limited to computer practitioners or academics. The Workshop has relevance to other disciplines where software reliability is of importance.

***Workshop Themes***

The workshop will embrace a range of themes and goals in its programme of experience papers (we expect themes of FIARS will be explored form both academic and industry perspectives). The following is an indicative, but by no means exhaustive list of experience topics that we solicit:

• Current challenges in sharing industry reliability data
• Challenges in performing experiments/case-studies with industry data from any discipline
• Issues with analysing industry data (software-related)
• Preserving anonymity/security in industry data
• Lessons learnt using industry data
• Issues associated with reporting results using industrial data
• Specific current research/initiatives in the area of industrial-academic co-operation
• Best practice in collaboration between industry and academia
• Short surveys and analyses of industrial-academia collaborations
• Future directions, challenges and initiatives in collaborations (i.e., the landscape)

***Important dates***

Full paper submission: July 21, 2017
Paper notification: August 13, 2017
Submission of camera-ready copy: August 28, 2017

***Submission details***

Submit original full papers (not published or submitted elsewhere) with a maximum of 6 pages. Include the title of the paper, the name and affiliation of each author, an abstract and up to 4 keywords. We also solicit short papers of no more than 4 pages IEEE conference proceedings format. Please indicate clearly at the end of the title that it is a “Short Paper”.

Both research papers and industry experience reports are welcome. All submissions must be written in English, follow the IEEE conference proceedings format, and be uploaded through the workshop submission site at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fiars2017. Each submission will be reviewed by three PC members. Paper selection is based on originality, technical contribution, presentation and relevance to FIARS. At least one author of each accepted paper must register with the full fee and present at the workshop in order for the paper to be included in the ISSRE 2017 Supplemental Proceedings. Papers will also be submitted to the IEEE Xplore database.

***Organisers***

- Professor Steve Counsell, Department of Computer Science, Brunel University, London (Steve.counsell@brunel.ac.uk).
- Professor Tracy Hall, Department of Computer Science, Brunel University, London (Tracy.hall@brunel.ac.uk).
- Dr Stephen Swift, Department of Computer Science, Brunel University, London (Stephen.swift@brunel.ac.uk).
- Dr James Cain, SAM, Newbury, Berkshire, UK (Industrial Advisor).