The Engineering track at this year’s International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2018) provides researchers, practitioners, and educators with a platform to present and discuss the most recent innovations and findings in the field of software architecture by means of tools, case studies, software architecture artefacts, and technical talks.

Types of Submissions

We solicit the following types of submissions:

  • Tool demonstrations (4+2 pages)
  • Software architecture artefacts (4 pages)
  • Case studies (4 pages)
  • Technical talks (1 page)

In the tools category, we distinguish two types of submissions addressing any aspect of tool support to help software architects, researchers, and practitioners:

  • Tools used in practice, either from commercial vendors or open-source projects. These demonstrations should focus on practical applications within the different activities of software architecting and should particularly show how they advance the current state of the practice. New ideas and features are particularly welcome.
  • Tools used in research, either from academia or industrial research environments. These demonstrations are intended to highlight underlying scientific contributions and show how scientific approaches have been transferred into a working tool.

Both categories may range from early prototypes to in-house or pre-commercialized products. Authors of regular ICSA papers are also welcome to submit an accompanying tool paper by adding information regarding the actual demo as an appendix, as described further under submission requirements.

In the case studies category, we seek submissions that demonstrate applications of architecture-centric engineering practices to real-world problems. The demonstrated engineering practice can be either a novel or recent state-of the art practice or a well-established practice applied in a specific domain. Authors should discuss and evaluate the advantages, drawbacks, limitations, problems, and any adaptations of the engineering practice to suit the technical, business or/or social context of their company or application domain.

The software architecture artefact category seeks submissions that describe architectures of software products, not only demonstrating how to create architectures, but also serving as instructive examples for the community in how to succinctly yet comprehensively capture and communicate architectures of such products.

Technical talks must feature current trends in the industry on the practice of software architecture presenting ideas that are both inspirational and informative.

Formatting and Submission Instructions

All submissions must conform to the Author Instructions. Submissions of papers for tools, case studies and software architecture artefacts must have a maximum length of 4 pages, describing the approach, how it relates to other industrial or research efforts, including references, and what the expected benefits are. Technical talks are limited to a one page overview of the talk. No double-blind review will apply to Engineering track papers.

Tool papers must also include an appendix of maximum 2 pages (not included in the page count) that provides a brief description on how the tool demonstration will be conducted, information on tool availability, maturity and the web-page for the tool (if one exists). Authors may optionally create a video (maximum length of 5 minutes) in high resolution and include, in the appendix, a link to a page where the video can be viewed. Note that the video is not mandatory, but if it is available, it will be used to the benefit of the evaluation of the submission.

All papers are to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair submission system, by the submission deadline, and must not have been published before.

Optional Requirements

We ask participants to publish tools and artefacts as open (educational) material whenever possible, e.g., via a Free/Open Source licence (e.g., GPL), a Creative Commons license, or Public domain license, and make tools and artefacts available on an open online repository with a reasonable retention period, e.g., Github. Industry participants are exempted if intellectual property regulations at their company prevent open publication of tools and artefacts.

Moreover, we ask participants to make their presentations open and re-usable via SlideWiki, either by directly using Slidewiki to create the presentation, uploading a Powerpoint or OpenOffice Impress presentation file to SlideWiki, or by importing the presentation slides as images, e.g., from PDF or Prezi PDF export. The track organisers can provide you assistance with this.

At the conference, we ask the authors of accepted papers to demonstrate or display their tools, architecture artefacts, case studies, or technical talks during one of the breaks in between sessions. This can be either a tool demonstration on a computer (monitors will be provided), or an overview poster depicting interesting facts and results from the case study, architecture artefact, or technical talk. This is in addition to the presentation of work during the engineering track session.

Important dates

  • Abstracts (mandatory) due: 8 March, 2018
  • Papers due:  15 March, 2018
  • Notification of acceptance: 5 April, 2018
  • Camera-ready due: 12 April, 2018

Publication and Attendance

All accepted contributions will be published in ICSA 2018 Companion proceedings, and appear in IEEE Xplore Digital Library. At least one author of an accepted contribution is required to register and present the work at the conference. ICSA 2018 will ensure that all accepted contributions can be presented regardless of US immigration rules.

Organization

For more information please contact the Engineering Track chairs:

  • Klaas-Andries de Graaf (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL) – ka.de.graaf(at)vu.nl
  • Raghu Sangwan (The Pennsylvania State University, USA) – rsangwan(at)psu.edu

Program Committee

  1. Aldeida Aleti, Monash University, Australia
  2. Remco de Boer, ArchiXL, Netherlands
  3. Yuanfang Cai, Drexel University, USA
  4. George Fairbanks, Google, USA
  5. Michael Golm, Siemens, USA
  6. Tomi Männistö, University of Helsinki, Finland
  7. Gabriel Moreno, SEI, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
  8. Eltjo Poort, CGI, USA
  9. Hans Ros, Siemens, USA
  10. Eoin Woods, Artechra, UK
  11. Olaf Zimmermann, HSR FHO, Switzerland