SQM 2013 - 7th International Workshop on Software Quality and Maintainability

Software is playing a crucial role in modern societies. Not only do people rely on it for their daily operations or business, but for their lives as well. For this reason, correct and consistent behavior of software systems is a fundamental and critical part of end user expectations. Additionally, businesses require cost-effective production, maintenance, and operation of their systems. Thus, the demand for high quality and maintainability software is increasing, setting it as a differentiator for the success or failure of a software product, as well as the dominator for the commercial success of companies.
The main question that arises is how quality is measured and communicated to whom (the stakeholders). What, where, and when we assess and assure quality are also open issues. Many views have been expressed about software quality attributes including maintainability, evolvability, portability, robustness, reliability, usability, and efficiency. Some of these have been formulated in standards such as ISO/IEC-9126, its successor ISO/IEC 25010 (SQuaRE), and CMMI. However, the debate about quality and maintainability between software producers, vendors and users is still on, while organizations need the ability to evaluate the software systems they use or develop from multiple viewpoints.
So, is "software quality in the eye of the beholder"? This workshop aims at feeding into this debate by establishing what the state of the practice and the way forward is.
Topics
We are looking for research and empirical contributions in areas including, but not limited to the following:
Software quality attributes and quality requirements
Software measurement and metrics
Software maintainability and traceability
Software quality assessment: practice and experience
Software analysis techniques and automation
Software evolution and trends prediction
Software economics and technical debt
Software quality standards and compliance
Software quality certification
Experience (success or failure) reports and empirical studies
Intended audience
In this session, the key concept and aim is at giving the opportunity to researchers to present their original work and to practitioners to relate their experiences on issues pertaining to software quality and maintainability and how to bridge the gap between end user expectations, business requirements, vendor performance, and engineering constraints. There are no restrictions regarding the background of the participants. Both researchers and practitioners are welcomed.
Format
The workshop will consist of presentations of accepted papers and one or more invited talks. There will be ample time for discussion, and a highly interactive closing discussion will be prepared and facilitated by the session chairs.
Paper submission & publication
We solicit short position papers or long papers with a maximum length of 10 pages. All accepted workshop papers will be edited and included on a digital medium (USB stick) that will accompany the CSMR 2013 proceedings as distributed during the conference.
We will post updates as soon as we have them on our website and our Twitter account.
Regarding format, please follow the instructions provided by CSMR.