Goals

The goal of the New and Emerging Ideas (NEMI) track at ICSA 2017 is to encourage the software architecture community to propose radical new software architecture research directions that represent disruptive innovations in the making, which can challenge the status quo of the software architecture discipline.

To support that goal, the NEMI 2017 track will publish two kinds of papers:

  1. Reflections (on the past) such as:
    • Bold arguments against current research directions;
    • Results that challenge established results or beliefs giving evidence that call for fundamentally new directions.
  2. Visions and New Directions (of the future):
    • Bold visions of new directions which may not yet be supported by solid results but rather by a strong and well motivated scientific intuition. An example of such a vision can be unusual synergies with other disciplines, or the importance of software engineering in problems whose software engineering aspects have not been studied earlier.
    • Totally new approaches, techniques, or theories, never published before, that can bring new results to a field of research;

NEMI submissions must clearly motivate and illustrate a rationale for changing current practice and/or research in software architecture. Note that evaluation results are not required for NEMI papers (but if such results exist, then they may be presented, if only to give the reviewers a feel about the evaluation plan). Strong argumentation and reasoning is expected to inspire the readers.

Scope

NEMI provides a forum for innovative, thought-provoking research in software architecture in order to accelerate the exposure of the community to early yet promising and potentially inspiring research efforts.

NEMI papers are not second-class ICSA research track papers. NEMI is a forum for first-class contributions that provide novel, soundly motivated research directions and emerging results.

In principle, the track addresses the same topics of interest as those of the technical research paper track. However, NEMI authors are encouraged to combine these topics in new ways, to establish connections to other fields outside of classical software architecture, as well as to argue for the importance of software architecture research in areas not explicitly listed.

Out of scope

A NEMI submission should not be just a position statement, research submissions lacking an evaluation, nor disguised advertisements for previously published results. For such out-of-scope submissions, authors should consider submitting to the main ICSA conference, one of the many ICSA workshops, or another track.

Evaluation

All papers will be evaluated in terms of the following criteria:

  • Value: the problem is worth exploring;
  • Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice;
  • Scope: software architecture related topics
  • Originality: new insight;
  • Rationale: soundness of the rationale and argumentation;
  • Evaluation: appropriate consideration of relevant literature and/or research evaluation to demonstrate originality and arguments;

How to submit

A NEMI submission must conform at the time of submission to the ICSA 2017 submission and formatting instructions, and must not exceed four pages, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. NEMI papers are to be submitted electronically at the NEMI EasyChair submission site, by the submission deadline.

Submissions that do not comply with the instructions and size limits may be rejected without review.

Note that authors of accepted papers are also required to submit a poster describing their work.

Important dates

  • Abstracts (mandatory) due: 18 February 2017
  • Papers due: 23 February 2017
  • Papers notification: 10 March 2017
  • Camera-ready due: 16 March 2017

Program chairs

Henry Muccini, University of L’Aquila, Italy
Antony Tang, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Program Committe Members

Paris Avgeriou, University of Groningen, Netherlands
Len Bass, CMU, USA
Remco de Boer, ArchiXL, Netherlands
Peter Eeles, IBM, UK
David Garlan, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Rich Hilliard, Independent Consultant, USA
Rick Kazman, Hawaii University, USA
John Klein, SEI, USA
Philippe Kruchten, University of British Columbia, Canada
Patricia Lago, Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tomi Mannisto, University of Helsinki, Finland
Robert Nord, SEI, USA
Eltjo Poort, CGI, Netherlands
Eoin Woods, ,Artechra, UK
Liming Zhu, Data61, Australia
Olaf Zimmermann, HSR FHO, Switzerland
Uwe Zdun, University of Vienna, Austria