SQM 2014 - Eight International Workshop on Software Quality and Maintainability

The quality of software has lots of impact on the involved users, developers and their organisations in several respects: on one hand the correct and consistent behaviour of software systems, and on the other hand the time-to-market, agility and cost-effectiveness of production, maintenance, and operation of the software systems. As a result, the demand for high- quality software is increasing and it is becoming more clearly a differentiator for the success or failure of a software product.
This workshop focuses on the boundaries between theory and practice of software quality: what determines the quality of a software system, and what determines the costs of operating and maintaining software? What quality attributes in a system are desirable in practice, and (how) can they be measured?
Many views have been expressed about software quality attributes, including maintainability, evolvability, portability, robustness, reliability, usability, and efficiency. These have been formulated in standards such as ISO/IEC-9126, its suc- cessor ISO/IEC 25010 (SQuaRE) and CMMI. However, the debate about quality and maintainability between software producers, vendors and users is ongoing, while organizations need the ability to evaluate the software systems they use or develop from multiple angles.
So, is "Software quality in the eye of the beholder"? This workshop session 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, empirical studies, industry practices and experiences (success or failure) on:
Software quality attributes and quality requirements
Software economics and technical debt
Software measurement and metrics
Software maintainability and traceability
Software quality assessment
Software quality standards and compliance
Software quality certification
Estimation, prediction, evolution and trends for all of the above
Intended audience
The key concept and aim of this workshop is to give the opportunity to researchers to present their original work and to practitioners to relate their experiences on issues pertaining to system 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 with a maximum length of 4 pages or long papers with a maximum length of 10 pages. Papers are to be submitted through EasyChair. All accepted workshop papers will be edited and bound together into an informal proceedings volume, which will only be distributed to the workshop attendees. After the workshop, all authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit a final version of the paper for a special issue in e.g. ENTCS, Electronic Communications of the EASST, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, or Springers Quality Journal, to be determined at a later date.
We will post updates as soon as we have them on our website and our Twitter account.
Papers are to be submitted through EasyChair.
Regarding format, please follow the instructions provided by CSMR-WCRE.
Previous editions
SQM 2013
SQM 2012
SQM 2011
SQM 2010
SQM 2009
SQM 2008
SQM 2007