Call for Papers — EMSE Special Issue on “Program Comprehension”

A special issue of the Empirical Software Engineering Journal.
This special issue is a partnership with the International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2021)

Editors of the Special Issue

• Anita Sarma, (Oregon State University, USA), anita.sarma@oregonstate.edu;
• Fabio Palomba, (University of Salerno, Italy), fpalomba@unisa.it;
• Alexander Serebrenik, (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands), a.serebrenik@tue.nl.

Description of the Special Issue

Program comprehension encompasses both human activities for comprehending the software and technologies for supporting such comprehension. It plays a central role in most of the phases of the software development life cycle, where it helps facilitate reuse, inspection, maintenance, reverse engineering, reengineering, migration, and extension of existing software systems. The special issue invites submission on novel and innovative research results and industrial experience papers in the area of program comprehension. We especially encourage the submission of extended papers from the 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2021).

The evaluation of papers will be based on:

• Underlying methodological soundness and rigor;
• Novelty of the work;
• The quality of the reporting;
• Strength of empirical evaluation/basis;
• Significance and reproducibility of the results.

Submission Topics

• Empirical evaluations of program comprehension tools, techniques, and approaches;
• Human aspects in program comprehension, including gender considerations in program comprehension, information processing strategies, the role of emotions in program comprehension, and more;
• Cognitive theories for program comprehension, including experiments, empirical studies, and case studies;
• Collaborative software engineering practices for program comprehension;
• Individual, collaborative, distributed, and global program comprehension;
• Novel visualization techniques and interfaces to support program comprehension, including searching, browsing and analyzing;
• Novel text summarisation techniques and interfaces to support program comprehension, including searching, browsing and analyzing;
• Comprehension of specific types of software systems, such as open/closed source, mobile applications, spreadsheets, web-based systems, legacy systems, product lines, libraries, multi-threaded applications, and systems of systems;
• Comprehension in the context of diverse software process models and specific lifecycle activities, such as: maintenance, evolution, re-engineering, migration, security, auditing, and testing;
• Comprehension of software artifacts ranging from requirements documents to test cases and crash logs; from API documentation to models, meta-models and model transformation; and from Stack Overflow questions & answers to GitHub code review messages - all artifacts software developer encounters when creating or evolving software.
• Comprehension and legal issues, such as due diligence, intellectual property, reverse engineering, and litigation;
• Issues and case studies in the transfer of program comprehension technology to industry.
• Tool support for program comprehension.

Schedule

• Submission Deadline: September 30, 2021
• First Round Review Due: January 15, 2022
• Author Revision Due: April 15, 2022

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 “ICPC-2021” for “Please select the issue your manuscript belongs to”.
• In the cover letter, please explicitly explain why the submission fits with the special issue and, in case of extensions, what is the additional research with respect to the conference version.

For formatting guidelines as well as submission instructions, visit http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/10664?detailsPage=pltci_2530593.