[AISWorld] CFP: Software Engineering Success and Failure, a Special Issue of Empirical Software Engineering

[paulralph at gmail.com]

Call for Papers – Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE)
Special Issue on Software Engineering Success and Failure


Submission Deadline: 15 NOV 2015


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Introduction
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A goal of software engineering research is to improve the rate of 
software project success and reduce the risk of failure. This special 
issue aims to address fundamental questions like what does 
success/failure really mean, how does it happen, what causes it and how 
do we rigorously investigate it? We solicit high-quality articles on a 
variety of topics including (but not limited to) the following.


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Example Topics
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* What do success and failure mean in software engineering? What are 
their dimensions?
* What can we learn from previous software engineering successes and 
failures?
* What causes software engineering success and failure?
* How should we collect, analyse, describe and apply the factors leading 
to software engineering success and failure? What are the relationship 
among  these causes?”
* What is the relationship between stakeholder characteristics, such as 
expectations and competence, and software engineering success?
* What is the relationship between project management approaches, such 
as Scrum or Lean, and software engineering success?
* What is the relationship between tools, such as distributed version 
control or test automation, and software engineering success?
* What is the relationship between socio-technical practices, such as 
pair programming or paper prototyping, and software engineering success?
* How can we predict and prevent or recover from software project failures?
* How can we avoid overconfidence, over-optimism and other potentially 
negative effects of previous successes?
* How can we avoid organizational overlearning (seeing patterns that are 
not there due to a strong wish to learn from, for example, overreacting 
to a previous costly failure)?
* What are the key methodological challenges for success and failure 
research? How can they be overcome?


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Study types:
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We welcome all manner of empirical studies related to success and 
failure including:
* Meta-analyses, thematic syntheses and other systematic literature 
reviews.
* Experiments and simulations establishing relationships between 
software engineering activities (e.g. pair programming), tools (e.g. a 
debugger), techniques (e.g. persona modeling) or phenomena (e.g. 
creativity) and success or failure.
* Data mining or econometric analysis developing statistical models of 
success and failure
* Case studies, ethnographies and action research exploring perceptions 
of success and failure or contextual factors.
* Surveys of successes and failures in software engineering.
* Analyses of methodological and statistical challenges concerning 
research on software engineering successes and failures.


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Contact:
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If you have questions or would like to volunteer to be a reviewer of the 
papers, please contact the guest editors.


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Guest Editors:
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Magne Jørgensen, magnej at simula.no, University of Oslo, Norway
https://www.simula.no/people/magnej


Mika Mäntylä, mika.mantyla at oulu.fi, University of Oulu, Finland
http://mikamantyla.eu/


Paul Ralph, paul at paulralph.name, University of Auckland, New Zealand
http://paulralph.name/


Hakan Erdogmus, hakan.erdogmus at sv.cmu.edu, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/faculty-staff/erdogmus-hakan.html


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Submission Instructions:
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Papers should be submitted through the Empirical Software Engineering 
website (http://www.editorialmanager.com/emse/). Choose “SI:Success and 
Failure” as the Article Type.  Author Instructions are available here: 
http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/10664?detailsPage=pltci_2530593

—
Dr. Paul Ralph
Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Auckland
http://paulralph.name