Intelligent Software Engineering

Software systems have been playing important roles in business, scientific research, and our everyday lives. It is critical to improve both software productivity and quality, which are major challenges to software engineering researchers and practitioners. As developers work on a project, they leave behind many digital artifacts. These digital trails can provide insights into how software is developed and provide a rich source of information to help improve development practices. For instance, GitHub hosts more than 57M repositories, and is currently used by more than 20M developers. As another example, Stack Overflow has more than 3.9M registered users, 8.8M questions, and 41M comments. The productivity of software developers and testers can be improved using information from these repositories.

In recent years, intelligent software engineering has emerged as a promising means to address these challenges. In intelligent software engineering, Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques (e.g., deep learning) have been frequently applied to discover knowledge or build intelligent tools from software artifacts (e.g., specifications, source code, documentations, execution logs, code commits and bug reports) to improve software quality and development process (e.g., to obtain the insights for the causes leading to poor software quality, and to help the managers optimize the resources for better productivity). And these techniques have shown a great success in addressing various software engineering problems (e.g., code generation, code recommendation, and bug fix and repair). Therefore, intelligent software engineering has attracted great attention in both software engineering and AI communities.

We invite the submission of high-quality papers describing original and significant work in all areas of intelligent software engineering including (but not limited to): 1) Methodological and technical foundations of intelligent software engineering, 2) Approaches and techniques for knowledge discovery in various software artefacts, and 3) Applications of AI techniques to facilitate specialized tasks in software engineering. We especially encourage submission of extended papers from the 18th National Software Application Conference (NASAC 2019). Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

A. Intelligent software engineering techniques

A1. AI models and techniques for software engineering

A2. Robust and highly scalable algorithms for mining ultra-large-scale software systems

A3. Explainable and actionable AI models

A4. Visualizing AI models

B. Knowledge discovery in software artefacts

B1. Mining software specifications

B2. Mining source code/code commits

B3. Mining execution traces and logs

B4. Mining bug and crash reports

B5. Mining Q&A and social data

C. Intelligent software engineering in specialized tasks

C1. AI techniques for software development and reuse

C2. AI techniques for software maintenance and evolution

C3. AI techniques for software testing and debugging

C4. AI techniques for open source ecosystem best practices

C5. AI techniques for software defect identification and characterization

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Deadline: 15 September, 2019

Initial Author Notifications: 1 November 2019

Initial Author Revisions Due: 15 December 2019

Author Notifications for First Revision: 20 January 2020

Final Author Revisions Due: 1 March 2020

Final Author Notifications: 30 March 2020

Editors in Chief

Paris Avgeriou

David Shepherd

Special Issues Editor

W.K. Chan

Guest Editors

Ge Li, Peking University, China (lige@pku.edu.cn)
Hui Liu, Beijing Institute of Technology, China (liuhui08@bit.edu.cn)
David Lo, Singapore Management University, Singapore (davidlo@smu.edu.sg)
Xin Xia, Monash University, Australia (Xin.Xia@monash.edu, corresponding editor)

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

All manuscripts and any supplementary material should be submitted through the Elsevier Editorial System at http://ees.elsevier.com/jss. Follow the submission instructions given on this site. Please, select the article type as “SI: IntelSE”, from the “Choose Article Type” pull-down menu during the submission process. All submitted papers should adhere to the general principles of the Journal of Systems and Software articles. Submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors, available on the journal website. Submitted papers must be original, must not have been previously published or be under onsideration for publication elsewhere.

A submission extended from a previous conference version has to contain at least 30% new material. Please, note that the papers from NASAC 2019 that are also invited for this special issue, are subject to the same rule. Authors are requested to attach to the submitted paper their relevant, previously published articles and a summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal version.

For more information about the special issue, contact the guest editors.

DECISIONS

The guest editors together with the Editors-in-Chief and the Special Issues Editor will make final decisions.