Call for Papers — EMSE Special Issue on “Advances in Search-Based Software Engineering”

A special issue of the Empirical Software Engineering Journal.

Editors of the Special Issue

Aldeida Aleti, Monash University, Australia
Annibale Panichella, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Shin Yoo, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea

Scope

Search-based Software Engineering (SBSE) is a research area focused on the formulation of software engineering problems as search problems, and the subsequent use of complex heuristic techniques to attain optimal solutions to such problems. A wealth of engineering challenges – from test generation, to design refactoring, to process organization – can be solved efficiently through the application of automated optimization techniques. SBSE is a growing field – sitting at the crossroads between AI, machine learning, and software engineering – and SBSE techniques have begun to attain human-competitive results.

This special issue in the Empirical Software Engineering journal is intended to provide the research community and industry with a valuable collection of current, high-quality research articles in the area of SBSE. We invite the submission of high-quality papers describing novel and original work in all areas of SBSE including, but not limited to, the applications of SBSE to novel problems, theoretical analyses of search algorithms for software engineering, rigorous empirical evaluations of SBSE techniques, and reports of industrial experiences.

Submissions

Empirical Software Engineering http://link.springer.com/journal/10664 provides a forum for applied software engineering research with a strong empirical component and a venue for publishing empirical results relevant to both researchers and practitioners. Submitted papers must have a strong empirical basis/component to be eligible for this special issue. In addition to the open call for papers, all authors with a submission to the Symposium on Search Based Software Engineering (SSBSE 2020) will be encouraged to submit extended versions of their work. To comply with the goals of a journal publication, we will ask invited authors to revise and substantially extend original SSBSE papers. Some possible extensions can be adding additional practical applications determined through case studies or experiments, an additional empirical validation, systematic comparisons with other approaches, or a sound theoretical foundation. Revised papers should explicitly explain how they extend the original SSBSE papers.

The submissions will be reviewed using the Empirical Software Engineering Journal standards. The co-editors will not be permitted to submit manuscripts for consideration in the special issue. Papers will undergo a rigorous reviewing process which for extended papers may include some of the reviewers of the SBSE 2020 paper as well as some new reviewers.

Schedule

Submission Deadline: May 16, 2021

First Review Notification: August 16, 2021

Submission Instructions

Papers should be submitted through the Empirical Software Engineering editorial manager website (http://www.editorialmanager.com/emse/) as follows (1) select “Research Papers” and (2) later on the Additional Information page:

• Answer “Yes” to “Does this paper belong to a special issue?”
• And select “Advances in Search-Based Software Engineering” for “Please select the issue your manuscript belongs to”.

For formatting guidelines as well as submission instructions, visit https://www.springer.com/journal/10664/submission-guidelines