Call for Papers — EMSE Open Special Issue on “Code Legibility, Readability, and Understandability”

A special issue of the Empirical Software Engineering Journal.
This special issue is a partnership with the 1st International Workshop on Automated Support to Improve code Readability (AeSIR 2021), co-located with the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2021).

Editors of the Special Issue

• Felipe Ebert (Tilburg University, Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS), The Netherlands), f.ebert@jads.nl;
• Fernanda Madeiral (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), fer.madeiral@gmail.com;
• Simone Scalabrino (University of Molise, Italy), simone.scalabrino@unimol.it;
• Rocco Oliveto (University of Molise, Italy), rocco.oliveto@unimol.it;
• Fernando Castor (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), f.j.castordelimafilho@uu.nl;

Description of the Special Issue

Reading and understanding code are preliminary activities necessary to maintain and evolve existing systems. Such endeavors take most of developers time. Supporting code reading and understanding can strongly impact the quality and the cost of typical software engineering activities, such as refactoring, debugging, test cases development, and code reviewing. This special issue invites submission on novel and innovative research results and industrial experience papers on code legibility, readability, and understandability. We especially encourage the submission of extended papers from the 1st International Workshop on Automated Support to Improve code Readability (AeSIR 2021).

The evaluation of papers will be based on:

• Methodological soundness;
• Novelty and significance;
• Quality of the presentation;
• Strength of empirical evaluation;
• Reproducibility of the results.

Submission Topics

• Measuring and assessing the legibility, readability, and understandability of the source code;
• Improving the legibility, readability, and understandability of the source code;
• Legibility, readability, and understandability of non-code software artifacts (e.g., CI/CD pipelines);
• Practices used to manage code legibility, readability, and understandability evolution;
• Effects of code legibility, readability, and understandability on products and processes;
• Human studies on code legibility, readability, and understandability;
• Methods for teaching code reading and understanding;
• Replication studies on state-of-the-art tools and techniques for measuring and improving code legibility, readability, and understandability;

Schedule

• Submission Deadline: August 1, 2022
• First Round Review Due: November 1, 2022
• Author Revision Due: February 1, 2023

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 “Code Legibility, Readability, and Understandability” 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 workshop version.

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