Aims and Scope

The “Journal of Software: Evolution and Process” is an archival journal that publishes high quality, state-of-the-art research and practice papers dealing with the conception, development, testing, management, quality, maintenance, and evolution of software, systems, and services, as well as the continuous improvement of processes and capabilities surrounding them. The journal continues the tradition of “The Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice” and “Software Process: Improvements and Practice”. We will therefore continue to cover the traditional topics related to software maintenance and evolution as well as software process improvement and practice. At the same time, the concept behind the journal has evolved into a unified vision that recognizes the fundamental changes and transformations that are occurring in the fields of software and systems engineering and the need for us to adapt by broadening the topics that we address and the research methods that are used coupled with the perspectives that are utilised.

Fundamental changes are occurring in the variety, scale and scope of software, systems and services that are being developed from new web and mobile computing to battle theatre technologies and everything in between.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

    How software, systems and enabled services are conceived, justified, created, managed, maintained and evolved over time
    How new underlying technologies (which are constantly changing) can be elegantly integrated and dealt with as systems evolve over time
    How new platforms and architectures are developed, tested, modified, and evolved to create the variety of applications needed now, and in the future
    How new processes and tools can be utilised in all phases of the development lifecycle (from system concept to test) in order to conceive, justify, create, modify and evolve these new technologies, platforms, systems and services
    How high-level representations of existing software, systems and services can be reverse engineered and used to support maintenance and evolution
    How people issues regarding cross disciplinary or geographically dispersed virtual teams can be addressed
    How the skill sets needed to participate and manage these projects will be developed
    How globally dispersed projects should be managed
    How new models of collaboration and participation will be deployed and managed
    What models will be used to estimate costs and predict performance of projects and process changes
    The technical, schedule, budgetary and other risks associated with developing and evolving new systems and how they will be managed
    How to improve organisational capability and maturity
    How maturity assessments and evaluations can contribute to organisations
    How to continuously improve processes associated with software, systems and services
    The new business models that are needed for the software, systems, and services
    What the performance impact of process changes will be
    How process change efforts impacting systems and services will be managed and organised
    How justification, sourcing and technical development decisions will be made as software and systems evolve from products to services, or more likely a combination of both, along with tiered levels of service based on a “pay as you go” and “value in use” business models
    How the impacts of agile development and management of new software, systems and services will impact
    systems, services and organisations

The journal publishes research papers, empirical studies and state-of-the-art surveys. Occasionally, we publish special issues on topics of particular interest; proposals for such issues are welcome.