The 4th ICSE Workshop on General Theories of Software Engineering (GTSE 2015)

Monday, May 18, 2015, Florence, Italy 

In conjunction with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015)

(http://2015.icse-conferences.org/)

Key Dates

Paper submission deadline:  January 23, 2015 

Paper acceptance notification:  February 18, 2015

Camera-ready accepted paper deadline:  February 27, 2015 

Workshop:  May 18, 2015

Workshop Overview

Most academic disciplines emphasize the importance of their core, central or general theories. Examples of general theories include Big Bang Theory, Maxwell’s equations, The Theory of the Cell, The Theory of Evolution, Supply and Demand, Structuration Theory, The General Theory of Crime, Pure Theory of Law and The Theory of Marriage. Software engineering meanwhile, has not produced widely-accepted general theories. Lack of theory undermines the perceived scientific legitimacy of the field, curtails education and impedes development of a cumulative body of knowledge. GTSE consequently supports attempts to propose, synthesize, clarify and test core, central and general theories in the software engineering domain. GTSE especially promotes attempts to answer fundamental questions, integrate ideas from diverse sources and propose revolutionary, contrarian and generally ambitious new theories. 

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

New theories in software engineering

Groundbreaking extensions to existing theories

Groundbreaking synthesis of existing theories

Novel applications of theories from reference disciplines (e.g. sociology) to software engineering

Grounded theory, ethnography and qualitative approaches to theory building

Systematic literature review and thematic synthesis, leading to new theory

Empirical evaluation of general theories

Software engineering process theories

Research methodologies for general theory evaluation

Addressing core questions for a general theory:

How can a general theory of software engineering be of practical use?

What core phenomena should it explain?

What questions should it address?

What should its main concepts be?

How are they related?

How should it be expressed?

How can it be tested?

How can it gain acceptance throughout both the academic community and industry?

Contrarian perspectives on software engineering theory

Possible Contributions include (but are not limited to):

Theory proposals with conceptual evaluations

Theory building empirical field studies including grounded theory, case studies and ethnography

Theory building, explorative lab studies, experiments and simulations

Empirical evaluations of general, central or core theories (any research approach welcome)

Systematic literature reviews and thematic analyses

Conceptual contributions related to research methodology

Position papers on general theory topics

Submissions

We welcome full papers (up to 12 pages) and short papers (up to 4 pages) to allow submissions of not only developed research but also early ideas and position papers. The papers must follow ICSE technical papers formatting guidelines: http://2015.icse-conferences.org/submission-guidelines and they should be submitted to the workshop's EasyChair site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gtse2015. All papers will be published in the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries.

Organizing Committee

Paul Ralph, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Ivar Jacobson, Ivar Jacobson International, Switzerland

Gregor Engels, University of Paderborn, Germany

Michael Goedicke, paluno, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Contact information

To contact the organizers, please email: gtse2015@easychair.org