RELENG 2016 - 4th International Workshop on Release Engineering (RELENG)

Release engineering deals with all activities in between regular development and delivery of a software product to the end user, i.e., integration, build, test execution, packaging and delivery of software. Although research on this topic goes back for decades, the increasing heterogeneity and variability of software products along with the recent trend to reduce the release cycle to days or even hours starts to question some of the common beliefs and practices of the field.
The RELENG workshop series aims to provide a highly interactive forum for researchers and practitioners in release engineering to: (1) make researchers aware of the challenges and research opportunities for modern release engineering, and practitioners of the latest research results; (2) share experiences with practical approaches, tools, methods and techniques that are enabling rapid, robust deployment, and (3) build and maintain connections between the different communities.
The RELENG 2016 workshop will consist of a keynote, practitioner talks, paper presentations, working groups and a fishbowl panel for semi-structured group discussions. Two keynotes, presented by industrial release engineers, will set the stage for the workshop, introducing the challenges of modern software companies related to release engineering. RELENG 2016 will also feature a poster session to allow researchers and practitioners to present, show-case, and discuss their most recent advances, experiences, and challenges in release engineering in an informal setting.
Since bringing together practitioners and researchers is the core goal of RELENG, many co-organizers and half of the PC consists of release engineers, so we guarantee that each paper or abstract submission receives at least one review from a practitioner.
Topics for papers, talks, and posters include but are not limited to:
best practices for code movement (branching and integration)
continuous integration and testing
build and configuration of software
build system maintenance
testing and reporting infrastructures
package and dependency management
legal signoff and bill-of-materials
delivery and deployment of software
code signing and certificate management
continuous delivery, deployment, installation and software update
cloud provisioning and management
interaction with app stores
principles and automated techniques for release planning
release engineering for product lines
DevOps and interaction with regular development, maintenance, end user, etc.
large-scale build and test farms
multi-platform build and test
feedback on continuous delivery and deployment
Technical Papers (4 pages) should identify challenges, discuss opposing viewpoints, outline processes, or present solutions related to various aspects of release engineering.
Talk Abstracts (500 words) are only open to practitioners and should describe in 500 words or less, a talk on a key aspect of release engineering. These talks should be primarily experience-based and should be used as a means of communicating challenges that are in need of research.