Aims and scope

Automated Software Engineering is an archival, peer-reviewed journal publishing research, tutorial papers, survey and accounts of significant industrial experience in the foundations, techniques, tools and applications of automated software engineering technology. This includes the study of techniques for constructing, understanding, adapting, and modelling software artifacts and processes. Both automatic systems and collaborative systems are within the scope of the journal, as are computational models of human software engineering activities. Knowledge representations and artificial intelligence techniques applicable to automated software engineering are of interest, as are formal techniques that support or provide theoretical foundations.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to: specification and design representation schemes, both formal and informal; descriptions and models of the development process; tools and environments to support software development; cognition in software development, including studies of specifiers, designers and implementors, and cognitive properties of representation schemes, programming and programming languages; software development methods, analysis and validation; requirements elicitation, acquisition and formalization; system rationale; software quality and metrics; software reuse and adaptation; animation and execution of specifications and designs; domain modelling and analysis; software visualization; software object management; development of user interfaces; group and team work in software engineering; development of distributed, real-time, embedded and composite systems; systems integration; software evolution and maintenance; system testing; reverse engineering and program understanding; documentation and program explanation.

Automated Software Engineering is published bi-yearly by Springer, with worldwide distribution to individuals, industry and institutions. It includes reviews of books, software, conferences, and workshops.

Special Issue on Effective Program Analysis and Testing for Modern Software Development
Submission Date: 2025-01-31

Modern software systems are complex, and they evolve rapidly. It is key but challenging to ensure that modern software is of high quality. Software analysis and testing techniques are crucial for quality assurance. They are used throughout the software development process, covering areas such as bug finding, vulnerability detection, fault localization, security analysis, testing, and debugging. Recent intelligence-based approaches provide new opportunities and solutions for effective software development. Research of analysis and testing techniques for modern software development is of great scientific and practical value, as it provides important means for software quality enhancement. 

Aims and Scope

This special issue is aimed at addressing core challenges for modern software development with a focus on attracting methodological and technical solutions for the analysis and testing of modern software. We hope to bring together expertise of software analysis and testing from both academia and industry for the quality assurance and enhancement of modern software. 

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): 

    Program analysis 
    Software testing 
    Fault localization
    Program repair and debugging
    Vulnerability detection
    Fuzzing
    Security analysis
    Automated test generation
    Performance testing and analysis
    Human factors in testing 

Guest Editors

    Qi Xin, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, https://qixin5.github.io 
    Aldeida Aleti, Department of Software Systems & Cybersecurity, Monash Data Futures Institute, https://users.monash.edu.au/~aldeidaa 
    Liqian Chen, School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, https://lqchen.github.io 
    Hongyu Zhang, School of Big Data & Software Engineering, Chongqing University, https://sites.google.com/site/hongyujohn
    Jifeng Xuan, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, http://jifeng-xuan.com 

Important Dates

Submission deadline: Jan 31st, 2025 
Review deadline: Mar 14th, 2025 
Author revision: Apr 25th, 2025 
Final notification: May 16th, 2025 

Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the Special Issue. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation, by at least two independent reviewers. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the review process. 

Special Issue on Replications and Negative Results in SE
Submission Date: 2025-01-31

A significant portion of software engineering research is empirical and builds on prior work. However, the current publishing landscape incentivizes positive results, such as methods that outperform the prior state-of-the-art. This special issue is dedicated to replication studies of prior work and negative results. The scope of negative results also includes failed attempts that were unreported in previously published work. This Special Issue is meant to disseminate ideas that did not prove fruitful, but would interest the broader SE community. It also encourages researchers to extend previously published work to additional datasets, as well as report on the reproducibility of prior studies.

Reproducibility studies should clearly report the parts that were and were not reproducible, and are encouraged to follow the ACM guidelines on reproducibility (different team, different experimental setup): “The measurement can be obtained with stated precision by a different team, a different measuring system, in a different location on multiple trials. For computational experiments, this means that an independent group can obtain the same result using artifacts which they develop completely independently.”

Specifically, this issue explores the following, non-exhaustive list of topics:

    Broadly applicable empirical results; for example, if something that did not work is something that practitioners would think reasonable to try, especially if the demonstration of its failure is accompanied by some hypothesis or explanation.
    Ablation studies of previous work, such as those showing that the improvements reported were misattributed to the wrong component of their method, or that some component of the method does not significantly affect performance.
    Datasets or experiments showing that previous approaches do not generalize to other tasks, datasets, or domains.
    Trivial baselines that work suspiciously well for some task/dataset, that have not been previously reported.
    Experiments demonstrating the instability of prior work due to random seeds, hardware-specific constraints, processing methods, etc.
    Demonstration of issues with widely-used methodology in the SE literature, including but not limited to: data collection/preprocessing methods, evaluation methodologies and metrics, etc. Such papers are encouraged to provide recommendations to the community.
    Theoretical results showing that X should not be expected to work, possibly augmented with experiments demonstrating this negative effect.

How to Submit

Submissions must be original and not published or under review elsewhere. However, some overlap with prior work is expected due to the nature of the call.

All accepted papers from the RENE workshop at ASE will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to the Special Issue. Alternatively, authors may submit solely to the Special Issue on the Springer’s website: https://link.springer.com/collections/hagebcgebi.

Deadline

Jan 31, 2025

Guest editors

    Rahul Yedida, LexisNexis, rahul@ryedida.me
    Tim Menzies, North Carolina State University

Special Issue on Automated Program Repair, 2025
Submission Date: 2025-02-01

The Special Issue on Automated Program Repair in the ASE Journal (ASEJ) aims attract researchers, practitioners, and educators from various communities including software engineering, artificial intelligence, programming languages, and formal methods. In recent years, there has been a steady increase in research on automated program repair, leading to successful industrial deployments. Notably, recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have had a significant impact. Despite these considerable strides, automated program repair continues to face fundamental technological and societal challenges. The Special Issue on Automated Program Repair will create an opportunity for the research community to coordinate its effort for addressing these challenges, explore innovative ideas, and formulate an agenda for future research.

This issue will explore topics related but not limited to:

- Large language models for fixing bugs
- Automatically resolving GitHub issues
- Quality of automatically generated patches, overfitting analysis
- Scalability of program repair algorithms
- Repair of domain-specific bugs
- Applications of program repair
- Deployment of program repair
- Case studies on program repair
- Program repair tools
- Program repair benchmarks
- Program analysis analysis for program repair
- Testing and verification for program repair
- Fault localization for program repair

This issue is done in coordination with the International Workshop on Automated Program Repair (APR) 2025. In the workshop round, the authors will submit papers to HotCRP link text. Each accepted submission must be accompanied by a registration of at least one author and presented at APR 2025. The selected best papers from the APR workshop will be invited to submit their revisions to the Automated Software Engineering journal. Note that only the full papers (not short position papers) will be considered for publication in the journal. The authors should carefully address the comments from the workshop reviewers and prepare a detailed response letter. The revised papers will be reviewed by the same reviewers. Note this is a close call only for the participants of the APR workshop, and we do not allow new submission for the journal round.

Special Issue on Extended Papers from APSEC 2024
Submission Date: 2025-02-06

It has been 31 years since the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC) as a leading regional conference that gathers researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to exchange knowledge and best practices in software engineering, and to address emerging challenges and solutions in software engineering innovation. This year’s APSEC will be held on December 3-6, 2024 in Chongqing, China. APSEC 2024 will continue in the tradition of previous editions of this regional conference. As in past APSEC series, the main research track features the most recent and significant innovations in the field of software engineering and all its sub-disciplines. More details can be found at the homepage: https://conf.researchr.org/home/apsec-2024. In this year, we want to organize a special issue on AUSE.

Topics

This special issue is aimed at inviting high-quality and extended papers from APSEC 2024. The invited papers describe original results in the discipline of software engineering. Solicited topics include, but are not limited to:

    Tools and processes
        Agile processes
        DevOps and Container
        Configuration Management and Deployment
        Software Engineering Process and Standards
    Requirements and Design
        Service-oriented Computing
        Component-based Software Engineering
        Cooperative, Distributed, and Global Software Engineering
        Software Architecture, Modeling and Design
        Middleware, Frameworks, and APIs
        Software Product-line Engineering
    Testing and Analysis
        Testing, Verification, and Validation
        Program Analysis
        Program Synthesis
        Program Repairs
    Formal Aspects of Software Engineering
        Formal Methods
        Model-driven and Domain-specific Engineering
    Human Factors and Social Aspects of Software Engineering
        Software Comprehension, Visualization, and Traceability
        Software for Green and Sustainable Technologies
    AI and Software Engineering
        Search-based Software Engineering
        AI for SE, SE for AI
        LLM for SE, SE for LLM
    Dependability, Safety, and Reliability
    Software Maintenance and Evolution
        Refactoring
        Reverse Engineering
        Software Reuse
        Software Project Management
        Debugging, Defect Prediction and Fault Localization
    Software Repository Mining and Data Analytics

How to Submit

Submissions must be original and not published or under review elsewhere. However, some overlap with prior work is expected due to the nature of the call. Papers should be submitted via Springer’s website: https://link.springer.com/collections/ehhiiecgcf

Deadlines

    Submission Deadline: Feb 6, 2025
    Review deadline: Apr 6, 2025
    Author revision: May 20th, 2025
    Final notification: June 20th, 2025

Guest editors

    Meng Yan, mengy@cqu.edu.cn, School of Big Data & Software Engineering, Chongqing University, https://yanmeng.github.io/
    Jun Sun, junsun@smu.edu.sg, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore, http://sunjun.site
    Hongyu Zhang, hyzhang@cqu.edu.cn, School of Big Data & Software Engineering, Chongqing University, https://sites.google.com/site/hongyujohn

Special Issue on NIER@ASE
Submission Date: 2025-02-28

The Special Issue for the NIER@ASE Track in the Automated Software Engineering Journal aims to provide a platform for showcasing forward-looking, innovative research in software engineering. This special issue invites selected papers from the NIER track at the ASE conference to submit extended versions for publication. Authors are encouraged to submit papers that present significant, original, and unpublished results within these areas. Submissions will undergo a rigorous peer-review process to maintain the journal’s high standards. We invite researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to contribute their cutting-edge research and insights to this special issue.

Topics

The special issue welcomes submissions on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

    Requirements and Design:
        Requirements elicitation and management
        Traceability analysis
        Architecture and design
        Modeling and model-driven engineering
        Software product lines
        Component-based, service-oriented systems
        Object-oriented/Aspect-oriented
    Testing and Analysis:
        Regression, mutation, model-based testing
        Program analysis
        Program synthesis
        Program repairs
    Tools and Processes:
        Release engineering and DevOps
        Configuration and release management
        Agile processes
    Maintenance and Evolution:
        Debugging and fault-localization
        Refactoring and reengineering
        Reverse engineering
        Software reuse
        API design and management
    Formal Aspects of Software Engineering:
        Formal methods, validation, and verification
        Programming languages
        Specification languages, DSLs
    AI and Software Engineering:
        Search-based software engineering
        Recommender systems
        Autonomous and self-adapting systems
        AI for SE
        SE for AI
    Software Analytics:
        Mining software repositories
        Apps and app store analysis
    Human Aspects of Software Engineering:
        Program comprehension
        Systematic reviews, code inspection
        Human-computer interface
        Software visualization
        Crowd-based software engineering
        Distributed and collaborative software engineering
    Social Aspects of Software Engineering:
        Green and sustainable technologies
        Software economics
        Ethics in Software Engineering
    Dependability, Safety, and Reliability:
        Privacy and security
        Reliability
        Safety
        Performance

Deadline
Submission Deadline: Feb 2025

Guest Editors
John Businge and Denys Poshyvanyk