[ecoop-info] CFP: Special Issue on Automatic Repair (Emp. Soft. Engr.)

[Westley Weimer]

Special Issue on Automatic Repair
Empirical Software Engineering Journal (Springer)
Deadline: October 31st 2016
=================================================

Despite powerful advances in programming languages and defect detection,
software bugs affect virtually all software products and services. The
figures are overwhelming: for instance, the Mozilla bug repository, which
includes the Firefox browser, now receives about 200 new bug reports daily.
Even worse, many production failures are never reported by users. Crash
reporting systems, which are embedded in major software products including
operating system, office and internet applications, give a glimpse of the
scope of this issue. For example, each day Mozilla’s crash reporting system
receives about 40,000 crash reports for one version of Firefox alone.

In response to this problem, there has been a recent research focus on
techniques to reduce maintenance the costs associated with software repair.
This generally consists of automatically fixing software defects or
continuing in the face of failures. One example of automatic repair is
patch generation, where source code is synthesized to fix a particular bug.
Another example is runtime patching, in which behavior is corralled into
acceptability in the face of field failures at runtime.

The goal of this special issue is to gather the latest advances in
automatic software repair. Particular attention will be paid to empirical
evaluations. We seek to attract high quality contributions that advance the
state-of-the-art in automated software repair, including both extensions of
conference publications (typically requiring at least one-third new
material) and journal-first submissions.

The Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE) has the highest two-year
and five-year impact factors among all software engineering journals.

Editors of the Special Issue:
- Martin Monperrus, University of Lille & Inria, France
- Westley Weimer, University of Virginia, USA


Submission Topics
=================
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- automatic patch generation
- runtime software repair and behavior modification
- empirical studies for software repair
- human studies of patch quality
- social aspects of automatic software repair
- reports on industrial applications of automatic software repair
- machine learning for software repair
- automatic repair of domain-specific programs
- benchmarks for software repair
- integration of software repair in development processes
- automatic repair and DevOps
- automatic repair of vulnerabilities
- cost and economics of automatic software repair
- languages and frameworks for repair
- patch recommendation and suggestion
- automatic repair of data structure or concurrency errors
- the use of program repair as a client for other analyses (e.g., fault
   localization)

Submission deadline
===================
The submission deadline is October 31st 2016.

Formatting & Submission Instructions
====================================
Papers should be submitted through the Empirical Software Engineering
website (<http://www.editorialmanager.com/emse/>). Please choose "SI:
Automatic Software Repair" as the article type. For formatting guidelines
as well as submission instructions, visit
<https://www.editorialmanager.com/emse/default.aspx>