Software is the core of contemporary systems and its quality has then been, for the past decades, a recurrent topic that brought into existence many books, journals, standards, certification initiatives, conferences, interest groups, projects, tools, consulting companies, university courses and training initiatives.

Quality is considered as a crosscutting concern in the Software and Systems Engineering bodies of knowledge and encompasses product, processes and systems aspects, as it can be noticed in SEBoK 1.2 and SWEBOK V.3. It covers the whole development life cycle, from requirements to design, construction and testing to maintenance. Software Quality Engineering has become a de facto profession, as evidenced by ASQ’s certification scheme and associated body of knowledge.

Notwithstanding, researchers and practitioners on the field continuously propose new methods, techniques and tools at a great pace, most often with a final claim on system and software quality improvement. Unfortunately, not so often, are those new proposals presented along with some evidence of their “goodness”. Thus, our community need to increase the number of primary and secondary studies checking the conformance of software quality concerned with the claims produced by other researchers (i.e. replication studies) or investigating new quality features regarding software systems.

This thematic track is organized as part of the International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology for researchers, practitioners and educators to exchange ideas that will help exploring, understanding, and modeling the software quality phenomena based on evidence. We look for submissions on software quality that may range from primary studies (from case studies to controlled experiments, either applying quantitative or qualitative techniques) to secondary studies (from mapping studies to [quasi] systematic reviews, including meta-analysis or aggregation when possible). Novel and replication studies regarding software quality are also highly welcome. Submitted papers should provide an explicit description of the empirical strategy that was applied. We encourage the use of structured abstracts as suggested by the Information and Software Technology Journal.

Track Committee

Track chairs:

Ayse Tosun, İstanbul Technical University

Carmine Gravino, University of Salerno, Italy

Program Committee:

Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Universitá degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy

Gul Calikli, Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Tayana Conte, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Michael Felderer, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Martin Höst, Lund University, Sweden

Magne Jorgensen, Simula Research Lab.

Ekrem Kocaguneli, Pinterest, USA

Rudolf Ramler, Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria

Guilherme Horta Travassos, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Burak Turhan, Brunel University London, UK

Stefan Wagner, Institut für Softwaretechnologie, Germany