[ecoop-info] Final Call: Special Issue on Experimental Software Engineering in the Cloud (ESEiC)

[Pieter Van Gorp]

With just one month to the submission deadline, please consider the
final call for this exciting special issue:

     Science of Computer Programming
     http://www.elsevier.com/locate/scico

Special Issue on Experimental Software Engineering in the Cloud (ESEiC)
>> http://is.ieis.tue.nl/staff/pvgorp/research/?page=SCP11 <<

#### Important Dates

 * Submission due date: March 1, 2012
 * Notification of acceptance: August 1, 2012
 * Submission of final manuscript: October 1, 2012
 * Electronic publication on ScienceDirect: January, 2013

#### Aim

The special issue will contribute to the further development of experimental
software tools while also demonstrating ways in which the empirical evaluation
of software engineering results can be improved.

#### The idea in a nutshell: *1-click* Reproducibility and Accessibility

The journal 'Science of Computer Programming' of Elsevier Science has a long
history of publishing high-quality articles on programming and software. The
idea of this special issue on Experimental Software Engineering in the Cloud
(ESEiC) is to allow academic software developers to publish **entire software
environments** together with a paper that focuses on the empirical evaluation
of the related engineering techniques. In particular, participants to
programming and software engineering contests are invited to deploy all their
contest-related data and software in the academic [SHARE][1] cloud. By citing
that persistent deployment from their corresponding paper, authors can give
readers of the special issue 1-click access to the supportive research
materials. All results will thus be reproducible in exactly the way that the
author intended. Readers can also explore the effect of other inputs and
parameters further.

  [1]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2011.04.062

#### Call for Contributions

This special issue will collate articles that compare tools in a pragmatic
manner, for example by having tool developers or various types of tool users
solve a shared case study. As the special issue will focus on reproducibility
and accessibility, all submissions must include at least one SHARE virtual
machine demo. Obviously, authors that want to use a supplementary platform are
free to do so as well and discuss this in the related paper.

Especially solution comparisons from domains with complex software toolkits
and/or a lack of standard formats are in the scope of this special issue.
However, as illustrated by [this announcement][2] related to the ACM SIGPLAN
ICFP Programming Contest, even when considering research events for which
the case study challenge is very well-defined, it is a challenge to keep the
results available for further empirical evaluation. Therefore, papers that
discuss SHARE in more general archival and reproducibility settings can also
fit the scope of this special issue.

  [2]: http://www.icfpcontest.org/2011/07/duel-server-stopping.html

Controlled experiments involving professionals are also highly welcome. In
this case SHARE can be used to log exclusively the experiment-specific
behavior of such users from within a SHARE virtual machine, thus alleviating
typical privacy and computer security issues related to user behavior logging.

#### Guidelines for Authors

Submissions should adhere to the SCP author guidelines. Additionally, each
paper should cite the URL of at least one related SHARE virtual machine.
Authors should sign up to the [SCP_ESEiC][3] bundle in SHARE and are free to
choose the operating system of the remote virtual machine (Windows or Linux).
Special preferences should be communicated to the guest editors as soon as
possible. Submissions are not strictly bounded in size: economy of space is
not the same as economy with reader's time in our view and the second is
becoming more important than the first. Authors should however leverage the
potential of the SHARE demo and other innovative demonstration mechanisms
(like screencasts). The guest editors will work closely with Elsevier to
maximize the reader experience and innovative proposals.

  [3]: http://is.ieis.tue.nl/staff/pvgorp/share/?page=LookupImage&bNameSearch=SCP_ESEiC

#### Submission Instructions

Submissions will be managed by the Elsevier Editorial System (EES[4])
for SCP [4]. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified
for inclusion into the special issue, it is important that authors
select "Special Issue: ESEiC" when they reach the “Article Type” step
in the submission process.

  [4]: http://ees.elsevier.com/scico

#### Guest Editors

 * Pieter Van Gorp - http://is.ieis.tue.nl/staff/pvgorp/,
 * Louis Rose - http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~louis/, and
 * Ilkay Altintas - http://www.sdsc.edu/~altintas/