Visit the journal's proposal guidelines to submit a proposal for a special issue (original contributions on a topic within the scope of the journal) or a special section with extended papers from a conference of workshop within the scope of the journal.

Information and Software Technology is the international archival journal focusing on research and experience that contributes to the improvement of software development practices. The journal's scope includes methods and techniques to better engineer software and manage its development. Articles submitted for review should have a clear component of software engineering or address ways to improve the engineering and management of software development. Areas covered by the journal include: 

• Software management, quality and metrics,
• Software processes,
• Software architecture, modelling, specification, design and programming
• Functional and non-functional software requirements
• Software testing and verification & validation
• Empirical studies of all aspects of engineering and managing software development Short Communications is a new section dedicated to short papers addressing new ideas, controversial opinions, "Negative" results and much more. Read the Guide for authors for more information.

The journal encourages and welcomes submissions of systematic literature studies (reviews and maps) within the scope of the journal. Information and Software Technology is the premiere outlet for systematic literature studies in software engineering. Guidelines for conducting systematic reviews are provided here.

Special Issue on Regulatory Compliance in Software Engineering
Submission Date: 2025-09-05

Guest editors:

Dr.-Ing. Sallam Abualhaija
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Areas of Expertise: Requirements Engineering, Regulatory Compliance, Quality Assurance, Responsible AI

Dr. Michael Unterkalmsteiner
Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskron, Sweden
Areas of Expertise: Requirements Engineering, Testing, Empirical Software Engineering, Regulatory Compliance

Prof. Dr. Daniel Mendez
Blekinge Institute of Technology and fortiss, Karlskrona, Germany
Areas of Expertise: Requirements Engineering, Regulatory Compliance, Empirical Software Enmgineering

Special issue information:

This special issue in the Information and Software Technology journal is intended to provide researchers with a venue to present insights, experiences, innovations and solutions in the study of regulatory compliance in Software Engineering. The engineering of software-intensive products and services is confronted more and more with the challenge of complying with a plethora of regulations emerging from different sources and affecting both engineering processes and product characteristics alike. Regulatory compliance in Software Engineering refers to the verifiable adherence to relevant regulatory artefacts ranging from obligatory (i.e. legally binding) laws to domain-specific standards such as safety and security standards.

All submissions will undergo a rigorous reviewing process. Each submission will be evaluated by at least three independent reviewers who are experts in this field. The review process will assess submissions based on several key criteria, including relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, potential impact, and quality of presentation. Reviewing criteria are detailed at this link.

The guest editors of the special issue are not permitted to submit.

Papers submitted to the Special Issue should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of its topics, outlined below. Extensions of previously published material are accepted, if the extensions are substantial, and the relation to previously published material is clearly explained within the manuscript. In line with the journal’s policy submissions or any substantially overlapping work must not be under review or published in another journal or conference during the review process.

Submission topics

We particularly invite research papers reporting on in-practice studies and solution proposals as well as elaborate experience reports that critically reflect upon contemporary challenges and practices for regulatory compliance in software engineering (the scope of the submission should become apparent from the abstract). We further invite submissions from interdisciplinary configurations of authors and domains (such as LegalTech, InsurTech, FinTech, or science and technology studies) that address questions of high relevance to the engineering of software-intensive products and services. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

    Checking compliance of software artefacts against regulations
    Dealing with changes of software engineering artefacts as well as regulations and how to ensure compliance throughout those changes
    Traceability of regulations to engineering artefacts
    Challenges in modeling regulations (including regulations for specific domains)
    Machine-analyzable representations of regulations
    Ensuring compliance across multiple jurisdictions, domains, and platforms
    Granularity level of legal interpretation
    Change impact analysis of regulatory changes
    Domain-specific compliance checking
    Requirements elicitation from regulations
    Compliance for AI-enabled systems with emphasis on AI regulations
    Legal requirements as non-functional requirements
    Human supervision in the compliance process
    Interpretability - multiple stakeholders use compliance checking systems
    Meta-compliance: the compliance of compliance checking solutions
    Methodological papers on multidisciplinary collaboration
    Theoretical papers on the legal perspective of regulatory compliance
    Risk management and legal accountability within regulatory compliance
    Teaching and education for regulatory compliance