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Empirical Software Engineering

An International Journal

Publishing model:
Hybrid
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Empirical Software Engineering - Call for Papers: Software Reliability Engineering

Aim and Scope

With software becoming pivotal in today's systems and, consequently, in our daily lives, ensuring its reliability has become as important as challenging. In response to emerging needs from society, software has become more complex than ever: more often than not, it is required i) to be able to autonomously learn and predict in order to support decisions, by exploiting increasingly powerful machine learning techniques including generative AI; ii) to seamlessly interact with the surrounding environment, including humans, and iii) possibly leveraging pervasive and distributed computing paradigms (e.g., the cloud-edge continuum and/or IoT) that further adds complexity and heterogeneity. This data- (hence processing-)dependent and environment-dependent uncertainty makes software-intensive systems particularly prone to exhibit (business-, mission- or safety-)critical behaviours: the central challenge today is not how to build new systems, but how to make them justifiably trustworthy. Failing to meet this challenge could seriously undermine the trust that people have in the systems of the future. 

In this changed context, despite decades of research and methodological advances, software reliability engineering is now required to investigate, define and experiment new principled approaches to prevent, predict, detect, remove and tolerate software faults along the whole software lifecycle, in order to assess and improve the final product/service reliability and dependability. This special issue aims to raise the awareness of researchers and practitioners in the software engineering community about the new challenges coming with the central role of software in the widely-spreading learning-enabled, autonomous, cyber-physical, and distributed systems in all the relevant domains wherein such systems are used. 

While there are special issues on specific classes of systems (e.g., on autonomous AI systems), the focus of this special issue will be on cross-cutting concerns about reliability. The question it will target is: how software reliability engineering research and practice should change to accommodate the new needs. 

Topics

This special issue aims to compile recent advances in software reliability and dependability engineering. It will showcase innovative research across various aspects of this field, covering the assessment, prediction, and improvement of software product and service reliability and dependability. Additionally, the special issue will emphasize research with compelling results derived from real-world case studies and industrial experiences. 

Contributions are encouraged to address a range of research issues and topics, including but not limited to:

  • Dependability attributes (i.e., security, safety, maintainability, survivability, resilience, robustness) impacting software reliability
  • Reliability threats, i.e. faults (defects, bugs, etc.), errors, failures
  • Reliability means (fault prevention, fault removal, fault tolerance, fault forecasting)
  • Software testing and formal methods
  • Software fault localization, debugging, root-cause analysis
  • Metrics, measurements and threat estimation for reliability prediction and the interplay with safety/security
  • Reliability of autonomous systems and (self-)adaptive systems
  • Reliability of AI-based systems, AI for Reliability Engineering
  • Reliability of Large Language/Foundational Model (LLM) and LLM for software reliability
  • Reliability of software services and Software as a Service (SaaS)
  • Reliability of model-based and auto-generated software 
  • Reliability of open-source software
  • Reliability of software dealing with Big Data
  • Reliability of model-based and auto-generated software
  • Reliability of green and sustainable systems
  • Reliability of mobile systems
  • Reliability of software within specific technological spaces (e.g., Internet of Things, Cloud, Semantic Web/Web 3.0, Virtualization, Blockchain, networks softwarization, 5G/6G, edge-to-cloud computing)
  • Normative/regulatory/ethical spaces about software reliability
  • Societal aspects of software reliability

Manuscript Submission Information

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. 

Authors are responsible for understanding and adhering to the submission guidelines. Papers are expected to have substantial scientific contribution, e.g., in the form of new algorithms, experiments or qualitative/quantitative comparisons, and neither verbatim transfer of large parts of the conference paper nor reproduction of already published figures will be tolerated. 

Important Dates

  • (Tentative) Paper submission deadline: February 1st, 2025
  • (Tentative) All reviews back and first-round notification: March 31st, 2025
  • (Tentative) Revised submission deadline: May 15th, 2025
  • (Tentative) All reviews back and final notification: July 31st, 2025. 

Guest Editors

  • Lei Ma (ma.lei@acm.org) The University of Tokyo / University of Alberta 
  • Roberto Pietrantuono (Roberto.pietrantuono@unina.it) University of Naples Federico II

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