In Conjunction with The International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering EASE 2022
Gothenburg, Sweden
June 13-15, 2022
The Second International Workshop on Properties of Software Engineering Research and their Systematic Documentation and Evaluation (PROPSER) aims to bring together researchers at various points in their career and practitioners alike, for discussing the systematic description and evaluation of software engineering research and their documentation.
The extend of software engineering research is rapidly growing and still needs to be demand-driven searched, to be understood and evaluated by researchers and practitioners. Researchers need to understand how to present their work, how to evaluate the work by other researchers in peer reviews and to build own research on top. Practitioners need to understand how to judge suitability and relevance for own projects.
The workshop is motivated by two observations:
(i) writing and reviewing software engineering research results is often hindered by the lack of a community understanding what are important questions (hypotheses) to validate research and which methods are suitable, appropriate and needed for demonstrating evidence.
(ii) retrieving research results just through syntactical terms of the paper title (or even abstract) is often very hard, and, as a consequence, comprehensively relating research results to each other in terms of support, strengthening or contradiction is rarely done.
Thus, this workshop aims to consider insights, new proposals and open questions on (i) planning and conducting research; (ii) writing research papers; (iii) reviewing research papers; (iv) communicating research and (v) effectively finding research results in a digital world.
Therefore, in PROPSER we want to discuss in particular:
The workshop aims to discuss these subjects as such, it is not meant to be a platform for original research results in a specific software engineering topic. Therefore, we intentionally do not require original new ideas to be submitted. Of course, for inclusion in the proceedings a paper should be original text.
Topics of interest of the proposed workshop include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
• properties for describing software engineering research, such as relevance, evidence, applicability, appropriateness, etc.
• general patterns for suitable empirical validations of research results and hypotheses.
• suitable classifications of software engineering research, beyond established subject categories.
• experiences, rules or guidelines, on how to decide on suitable validation methods depending on properties of the research.
• managing and organizing research knowledge more fine grained than paper citations.
Concretely, we invite three types of submissions:
taxonomy and overview papers (up to 8 pages): papers presenting or surveying classifications of software engineering subjects, empirical methods, areas of software applications, etc.; including hypotheses about relationships between such categories (e.g., "contributions of type X should be validated with method Y.")
open question papers (up to 6 pages): papers describing ongoing research that has unsolved questions regarding how to demonstrate the validity and relevance of the work.
proposal-for-solution papers (up to 6 pages): papers describing sketches or solutions to address one or several of the mentioned topics.
Note, that the "open question papers" are different from the commonly used format of research result submissions (like: "motivation, idea, foundations, approach, state of the art, validation, conclusion"). Of course, any paper of that format could be presented as an open question paper (keeping the first parts, but substituting the validation with open questions accordingly). But we also encourage the submission of papers on ongoing research, where validation is indeed open. Please note, that we intentionally to not require original new work to be submitted, as the workshop does not aim to be a platform for original research results in a specific software engineering subject. In fact, the workshop wants to discuss the above described subjects concerning the organisation, validation and documentation of software engineering research as such. Papers will be reviewed with respect of their rigour of argumentation, potential to spark interesting discussions during the workshop regarding the above mentioned topics.
Submissions are done via the Easychair site of EASE.
All accepted papers will be published at ACM EASE 2022 conference companion proceedings.
The deadlines and important dates for the submissions are as follows:
Ralf Reussner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) / FZI – IT Research Centre, Germany (main contact)
Anne Koziolek, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany
Francesca Lonetti, Institute of Information Science and Technologies "Alessandro Faedo" (ISTI-CNR), Italy
Antonia Bertolino, ISTI-CNR, Italy
Neil A. Ernst, University of Victoria, Canada
Robert Feldt, Chalmers University of Technology and Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Wilhelm Hasselbring, University of Kiel, Germany
Lutz Prechelt, FU Berlin, Germany
Klaus Schmid, Universität Hildesheim, Germany
Walter Tichy, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany
Marco Torchiano, Politecnico di Torino, Italy