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CALL FOR PAPERS - IEEE IWESEP 2016

The 7th IEEE International Workshop on Empirical Software Engineering
in Practice
http://iwesep2016.naist.jp/

March 13, 2016, Osaka, Japan
Co-located with IEEE SANER 2016
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The objective of the 7th IEEE International Workshop on Empirical Software
Engineering in Practice (IWESEP) is to foster the development of the area by
providing a forum where researchers and practitioners can report on and discuss
new research results and applications in the area of empirical software
engineering. The workshop encourages the exchange of ideas within the
international community to better understand, from an empirical viewpoint, the
strengths and weaknesses of technology in use and new technologies, with the
expectation of furthering the field of software engineering.

The workshop focuses on the processes, design and structure of empirical studies
as well as the results of specific studies. The workshop welcomes both original
and replicated studies, varying from controlled experiments to field studies,
from quantitative to qualitative. We solicit the following two types of
submissions: full research papers (max 6 pages) for oral presentations and
abstracts (max 700 words) for poster presentations. Please check the website for
more information.

Accepted research papers will appear in the IEEE Computer Society Digital
Library (CSDL).

Note that IWESEP 2016 is organized independently of SANER 2016 official
workshops and held on a different day from the official workshops.

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Special focus: Natural Language Processing and Game Theory

Since much of the data produced by software development is unstructured and
complex, empirical software engineering research should evolve by integrating
the state-of-the art techniques and theories for analyzing such data. This year,
IWESEP has a special focus to encourage exploration of Natural Language
Processing and Game Theory techniques for empirical software engineering. We
encourage authors to consider these topics in their submissions, but we also
welcome traditional empirical software engineering studies.

Game Theory + Empirical Software Engineering: Game theory is a fundamental
mathematical model for understanding the behavior of self-interested agents and
potentially provides a theoretical framework to analyze/explain why and how a
specific phenomenon occurs in a software development community. Mechanism design,
as a reverse problem of game theory, is a theory for designing a social system,
e.g. software ecosystem, in which agents behave sincerely in spite of the
freedom of their actions. The purpose of this special focus is to open avenues
of collaboration between software engineering and game theory/mechanism design.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Game theory models of software development environments
- Utility estimation based on mining software repositories
- Equilibrium analysis (e.g., Nash equilibrium)
- Design/applications of incentive mechanisms

Natural Language Processing + Empirical Software Engineering: Software
ecosystems abound with natural language data. This data includes developer
discussions, code comments, bug reports, and specifications. Natural Language
Processing (NLP) is a research area that specializes in processing in just this
variety of natural language data, and recent research has proven that the
techniques developed therein have the potential to contribute to the software
engineering field. For example, NLP has been used to make it easier to analyze
developer interactions, automatically generate comments for source code, and
provide natural language interfaces to search software repositories. In this
special focus session, we welcome papers on any interaction between NLP and
software engineering, from finished research results, to works-in-progress.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Automatic software artifact summarization/comment generation
- Analysis of software-related Interactions
- Natural language search of software repositories
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General call: In addition to the special focus of this year, traditional topics
of interest include:
- Empirical studies of software process and product
- Comparison of cost estimation techniques
- Analysis of the effects of design methods and characteristics
- Evaluation of the readability of coding styles
- Development, derivation and/or comparison of organizational models of
  software development
- Evaluation of testing methodologies
- Reports on the benefits derived from using software development environments
- Development of predictive models of defect rates and reliability from real
  data
- Infrastructure issues, such as measurement theory, experimental design,
  qualitative modeling and analysis approaches
- Experiences with research methods such as grounded theory, protocol studies
  or families of experiments
- Industrial experience in process improvement
- Quality measurement
- Process modeling and applications in industry
- Experience management


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Submission:

All submissions must use IEEE templates and should be submitted through
EasyChair.
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwesep2016

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Important Dates:

- Abstract submission: December 20th, 2015
- Paper submission: December 22th, 2015
- Notification: January 10th, 2016
- Camera Ready: January 22nd, 2016

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Organization

General Chair:
- Hideaki Hata (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)

Program Co-Chairs:
- Shinpei Hayashi (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
- Shane McIntosh (McGill University, Canada)

Special Focus Co-Chairs:
- Graham Neubig (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
- Taiki Todo (Kyushu University, Japan)

Publication Chair:
- Xin Yang (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)

Local Arrangement Chair:
- Tetsuya Kanda (Osaka University, Japan)

Finance Chair:
- Akinori Ihara (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)

Web Co-Chairs:
- Kenji Fujiwara (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
- Saya Onoue (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)

Student Staff Co-Chairs:
- Hiroaki Murakami (Osaka University, Japan)
- Passakorn Phannachitta (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)

Steering Committees:
- Akinori Ihara (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
- Yasutaka Kamei (Kyushu University, Japan)
- Shinsuke Matsumoto (Kobe University, Japan)
- Masateru Tsunoda (Kinki University, Japan)
- Raula Gaikovina Kula (Osaka University, Japan)

Advisory Committees:
- Katsuro Inoue (Osaka University, Japan)
- Shinji Kusumoto (Osaka University, Japan)
- Kenichi Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)

Program Committees:
- Bram Adams (Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada)
- Alberto Bacchelli (Delft University of Technology, Netherland)
- Gabriele Bavota (Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy)
- Olga Baysal (Carleton University, Canada)
- Cor-Paul Bezemer (Queen's University, Canada)
- Eunjong Choi (Osaka University, Japan)
- Bogdan Dit (Boise State University, USA)
- Daniel German (University of Victoria, Canada)
- Sonia Haiduc (Florida State University, USA)
- Yoshiki Higo (Osaka University, Japan)
- Akinori Ihara (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
- Zhen Ming Jiang (York University, Canada)
- Yasutaka Kamei (Kyushu University, Japan)
- Foutse Khomh (Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada)
- David Lo (Singapore Management University, Singapore)
- Osamu Mizuno (Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan)
- Andrea Mocci (University of Lugano, Switzerland)
- Meiyappan Nagappan (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)
- Graham Neubig (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
- Weiyi Shang (Concordia University, Canada)
- Taiki Todo (Kyushu University, Japan)
- Bogdan Vasilescu (University of California, Davis, USA)
- Thomas Zimmermann (Microsoft Research, USA)