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# 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 March 2022 (!!!extended!!!)
# 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
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