[AISWorld] CfP: Springer Software Quality Journal - Special Issue on Emerging Challenges in Software Certification and Verification

[Nuno Laranjeiro]

# Call for Papers
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Springer Software Quality Journal
Special Issue on Emerging Challenges in Software Certification and Verification
https://www.springer.com/journal/11219/updates/19379036
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# Important dates
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Paper submission deadline: 16 January 2022


# Description
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Software is pervasive in our society: its scope is widening more and more in many critical domains such as avionics, space, railway, automotive, nuclear, medical, air traffic control, and more recently in domains such as 5G networks in the telecom industry, and smart factories in Industry 4.0. Applications in these domains must adhere to stringent safety, security, and privacy requirements, which are imposed by regulations and by market expectations. Despite several standards for the certification of safety (e.g., ISO 26262, IEC 62304, EN50128, DO-178C) and security (e.g., Common Criteria,  ISO/IEC 15408, NIST Publication 800-53) have been proposed and matured over the years, we are facing new challenges towards the certification and verification of modern software systems, including:
- The use of Machine Learning for bringing autonomy in critical applications, where software development shifts from traditional coding to example-based training, which introduces new issues in curating the training process, operating and integrating ML models, and achieving confidence in the ML models through new forms of verification and validation and through “explainable AI” (XAI) techniques. 
- Safety, security, and privacy issues arising from new technologies, including mobile applications (e.g., for interacting with medical devices, and for tracing purposes), virtualization technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), unmanned autonomous vehicles, etc., which open a wider attack surface to malicious actors and are exposed to accidental faults.
- New software developments processes and techniques, in order to meet the demand for agility and efficiency, such as DevOps (and its declinations, such as DevSecOps), agile methodologies, software product lines, and distributed software development involving several organizations in complex supply chains, and the massive reuse of commercial and open-source off-the-shelf software components.

This special issue proposal for the Springer Software Quality Journal is aimed at innovative research towards these demanding challenges. The editors have been actively involved, during the last years, in the organization of a specific workshop on Software Certification, namely WoSoCer (last edition website: https://sites.google.com/view/wosocer2021/), where the community is engaged in a collaborative discourse on the challenges of certification in computer-based systems, in the context of several domains like critical infrastructures (e.g., railways, energy, avionics, etc.), cloud computing infrastructures, medical devices, etc.

We invite researchers and experts, from academia, industry, and regulatory authorities, to contribute to this special issue, by presenting novel and scalable solutions for the verification and certification of modern software systems, with particular attention to ML-based systems, innovative industrial applications (e.g., IoT-based systems), and security and privacy. The special issue will feature original, high-quality work covering both theoretical and experimental research on methods, formalism, techniques, tools, and processes for supporting verification tasks and certification processes. It will focus on research work with compelling results from the application of novel solutions on real-world case studies in critical domains, and industrial experiences with certification standards.

The Special Issue on Emerging Challenges in Software Certification and Verification aims to publish research results focusing on assessment, prediction and improvement of software reliability and dependability. The contributions should address, but are not limited to, the following research issues/topics:
- Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of dependability attributes for certification purposes, including reliability, safety, security, and privacy;
- Design and evaluation of certifiable software according to the needs of modern complex systems, including dynamic, autonomic, large-scale, and distributed systems;
- Selection, assessment, and integration of third-party components (e.g., Commercial-Off-The-Shelf and Open Source software) and software reuse in critical systems;
- Reuse of certification artifacts across different systems and different safety standards;
- Product-oriented certification and assurance cases;
- Verification and Validation of systems based on emerging technologies (such as IoT-based and ML-based systems, blockchain systems, virtualization-based systems) in the context of critical systems;
- Assessment and improvement of software development processes (e.g., SPICE, CMMI) in critical domains;
- Cost-related issues and return-on-investment for certification activities;
- Improving the quality and applicability of standards, and assessing standard compliance;
- Application of new practices (such as DevSecOps and agile software development) to the context of critical systems;
- Cross-fertilization between safety and security, security-related standards, and security certification.
- Open issues, practical experiences, and empirical studies on real-world case studies.


# Paper Submission
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Submitted articles must not have been previously published or currently submitted for journal publication elsewhere, and must be a significant contribution to the state of the art in software certification and verification.

All the submissions will be judged on novelty of the proposed problem and/or solution, technical relevance and practicality of presented ideas, relevance of the addressed topic to the scope of the Special Issue, writing and presentation, accuracy and impact of the results. As an author, you are responsible for understanding and adhering to the Springer SQJ submission guidelines, which are available at https://www.springer.com/journal/11219/submission-guidelines 

Please, carefully read the following guidelines before submitting your manuscript. In the case the manuscript extends a previous conference paper, please make sure to: 1) cite the previous paper(s); 2) clearly explain in the introduction and related work Sections what the contributions of the submitted paper are, and why they are significant; 3) leveraging on points 1 and 2, explain how the paper submitted to this Special Issue of Springer SQJ extends the previous work; 4) any material taken and used from the conference paper, or any other paper, must be properly attributed, i.e., ext must be quoted, cited and referenced. Permission for including figures that appear elsewhere must be obtained from the copyright owner.

To ensure proper submission, log in to the Editorial Manager (EM) for the Springer Software Quality Journal (https://www.editorialmanager.com/sqjo/default.aspx). The identifying Article Type in EM for author submission is Emerging challenges in Software Certification and Verification.


# Guest Editors
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- Luigi De Simone, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Department of Information Technologies and Electrical Enginnering, Naples, Italy
- Domenico Cotroneo, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Department of Information Technologies and Electrical Enginnering, Naples, Italy
- Nuno Laranjeiro, University of Coimbra, Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, Department of Informatics Engineering, Coimbra, Portugal