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.

Topics

• New ideas pertaining to empirical evaluation of software engineering technologies, methods, and tools, e.g., transferring and applying empirical methods from other disciplines to empirical software engineering
• Infrastructures and novel techniques/tools for supporting any phase of empirical studies
• Empirical studies using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods
• Cross- and multi-disciplinary methods and studies
• Experiments and quasi-experiments
• Case studies, action-research, and field studies
• Survey research
• Systematic literature reviews and mapping studies
• Meta-analysis, qualitative and quantitative synthesis of studies
• Replication of empirical studies and families of studies
• Empirically-based decision making
• Evaluation and comparison of techniques and models
• Development and evaluation of empirical prediction systems or software estimation models
• Mining software engineering repositories
• Modeling, measuring, and assessing product and/or process quality
• Simulation-based studies in software engineering
• Assessing the benefits / costs associated with using certain development technologies
• Industrial experience, Software project experience, and knowledge management
• Software technology transfer to the industry

Track Committee

Co-Chairs:

• Marcela Genero Bocco, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain.
• Silvia Abrahão, University Politècnica de València, Spain

Program Committee:

• Michael Felderer, University of Innsbruck, Switzerland
• Martin Höst, Lund University, Sweden
• Rudolf Ramler, Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria
• Guilherme Horta Travassos, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Stefan Wagner, Institut für Softwaretechnologie, Germany
• José Antonio Cruz-Lemus, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
• Fernando Brito e Abreu, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal
• Miguel Goulão, FCT/UNL, Portugal