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CALL FOR PAPERS
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13th Software Quality Days 2021
January 19 - 21, 2021 - Vienna, Austria
Detail: https://www.software-quality-days.com/en/lecturers/scientific/
Submission Page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swqd2021

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The 13th Software Quality Days (SWQD) conference and tools fair - one of the
largest software quality conferences in Europe - will bring together
researchers and practitioners from business, industry, and academia working
on quality assurance and quality management for software engineering and
information technology. 

In 2021 the SWQD conference hosts the 10th scientific program on research
and industry experience. The guiding topic for 2021 will be "Future
Perspectives on Software Engineering Quality"

This year, the scientific program offers two complementary scientific
workshops:
+ Workshop on Academia-Industry Collaboration (WAICol)
+ Workshop on Quality Assurance for AI (QAAI)

*** IMPORTANT DATES ***

- Full paper submission: 29.06.2020 (Extended)
- Notification of acceptance: 03.08.2020
- Camera-ready paper for Springer Publication: 28.08.2020

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*** MAIN SCIENTIFIC PROGRAM ***
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High software and systems quality are success-critical factors in
engineering practices and refer to product, process, and service quality.
However, quality attributes have to be embodied within individual phases of
software and systems development. 

In distributed engineering environments, for example, various stakeholders
coming from heterogeneous disciplines have to collaborate and interact
efficiently. Additional quality attributes with focus on collaboration and
data exchange might then apply. Mobile environments, to name another
example, typically refer to product quality and include quality requirements
regarding usability, interaction, safety, and security. Emerging trends in
the area of Big Data can, on the other side, focus on different quality
aspects such as (a) how to embody and assure quality in Big Data application
or (b) how to use Big Data in context of quality assurance activities such
as testing. In the 10th edition of the scientific program at the SWQD, we
aim at exploring the various future perspectives and contemporary challenges
in Software Engineering Quality.

Topics of interest for research and industrial experience paper include, but
are not limited to: 
+ System and software quality management methods
+ Improvement of software development methods and processes
+ Testing and quality assurance of software and software-intensive systems
+ Process and quality assurance automation
+ Requirements Engineering and Management
+ Project and Risk Management
+ Effort and quality estimation 
+ Metrics (product, process, project)
+ Domain specific quality issues such as embedded, medical, automotive systems
+ Novel trends in software quality
+ Crowdsourcing in Software Engineering
+ Quality assurance for Big Data applications.
+ Using Big Data for quality assurance activities. 


The scientific program of SWQD 2021 accepts two categories of conference
submissions. In both categories, papers demonstrating the practical
relevance of the topics, e.g. via an evaluation, will be preferred.

- Technical Research Papers should describe innovative research in software
quality concepts, standards, processes, methods, or tools. They should
describe a novel contribution to the field or significantly improve existing
solutions. The proposed solution technique or its application to this kind
of problem must be novel and sound. The author(s) must provide (empirical)
validation of the proposed solution, for example, a proof-of-concept and
sound arguments that the solution technique will scale up to
real-world-sized problems. Results must be stated clearly so that the
author(s) or others can further validate them in later research. A technical
solution paper should also be clear about its contributions with respect to
related work by others and to previous work by the author(s).
- Industrial Experience Papers should describe a significant experience in
applying software quality technology in a real-world context and they should
carefully identify and discuss important lessons learnt so that other
researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from the experience. The
author(s) should provide (empirical) evidence supporting the experience and
derived conclusions.
 
The SWQD 2021 conference will provide best paper awards in both categories,
i.e. technical research papers and industrial experience papers.

Submissions must contain original unpublished work, describe significant
novel contributions, and provide evidence on the validation of results.
Reports on industrial applications are particularly welcome. Papers must not
have been previously published or submitted for review elsewhere.
 
All scientific program contributions will be reviewed by the international
Program Committee on their scientific merit and relevance to the conference
topics and may be accepted as regular or short papers: 
- Full papers should be 15-20 pages, and
- Short Papers should be 8-12 pages.

Authors are encouraged to submit a PDF version of their paper via EasyChair
(https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swqd2021). Please select the paper
category (i.e., technical research paper of industry experience paper during
the submission process). The assignment to full and/or short papers is
implicitly given by the number pages per submission.


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*** WORKSHOP ON ACADEMIA-INDUSTRY COLLABORATION (WAICol) ***
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Developing software prototypes in the scope of research projects is not a
standard engineering task since they are targeted at exploring and
evaluating innovative approaches and provide initial implementations of
novel features. Therefore, such prototypes often have initial quality issues
that must be overcome in order to transfer the research results into
industry. 

Besides technical challenges, the teamwork and interaction of different
partners within research projects play an important role as there are
multiple ways on how to shape collaborations. In the workshop on academia
and industry collaborations, we aim at discussing experiences, best
practices, and lessons learned in such environments. 

Topics of interest for this workshop focus on (but are not limited to):
+ Challenges in Academia-Industry collaborations,
+ processes, methods and tools for transferring research prototypes into
industry,
+ experience reports, and
+ success stories and lessons learned.

The workshop on academia/industry collaboration program of SWQD 2021 accepts
one category of workshop submissions.
- Experience Reports should describe experiences in transferring research
results from academia into industrial applications or productive operations
(including, but not limited to reports on best practices on development
processes and quality management for scientific software that reasonably
balance sustainability and flexibility). Experiences can be of different
types such as recurring technical challenges and challenges between academic
and industrial partners from a collaborative and organizational perspective.
The authors should contribute to practice by addressing researchers as well
as practitioners and discuss success factors or lessons learned. The
organizers explicitly also encourage reports that discuss and analyze
negative results.

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*** WORKSHOP ON QUALITY ASSURANCE FOR AI (QAAI) ***
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Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in machine
learning and deep learning, and their integration into software-based
systems of all domains raises new challenges to engineering modern AI-based
systems. These systems are data-intensive, continuously evolving, and
self-adapting, which leads to new constructive and analytical quality
assurance approaches to guarantee their quality during development and
operation in live environments. On the constructive side, for instance, new
process models, requirements engineering approaches or continuous
integration and deployment models are needed. On the analytical side, for
instance, new data, offline and online testing approaches are needed for
AI-based systems.

In this workshop, we discuss visions, novel approaches, experiences and
challenges of constructive and analytical quality assurance of AI-based
systems.

Topics of interest for this workshop include 
- Analytical and constructive quality assurance for AI-based systems
- Data, offline and online testing approaches
- Runtime monitoring, coverage and trace analysis of data, models and code 
- Testbeds for data-intensive and AI-based systems
- Quality standards and guidelines for developing AI-based systems
- Agile requirements engineering, continuous experimentation, A/B testing

The workshop on quality assurance for AI technologies accepts one category
of workshop submission.
- Vision or Concept Papers should present visionary or conceptual ideas for
quality assurance of AI-based systems. Concept papers should illustrate the
discussed approaches by examples or preliminary evaluations.
- Experience or Challenge Papers should describe experiences in applying
quality assurance for AI-based systems or open challenges in quality
assurance for AI-based systems. The author(s) should properly frame the
experiences or challenges so that other researchers and/or practitioners can
benefit and base their work on the paper.

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*** ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND PAPER SUBMISSION ***
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Accepted papers will be included in the proceedings, published by Springer
LNBIP (abstracted/indexed in ISI Proceedings, DBLP, EI and Scopus), and the
Springer Digital library. See also the LNBIP Website for further
instructions to the authors.

+ Conference Website: https://www.software-quality-days.com/en/lecturers/scientific/
+ Paper Submission Page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swqd2021

We are looking forward to receiving your contribution and seeing you in
Vienna, Austria in January 2021.