International Journal on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

International Journal on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

SPECIAL ISSUE ON SOFTWARE TRACEABILITY

THEME AND GOALS:

Software traceability has been recognised as a significant factor of efficient software project management and software systems quality. Existing research has been concerned with the study and definition of different types of traceability relations and the provision of support for generating and maintaining these relations in software and requirements engineering tools and environments. However, as empirical studies of the traceability needs and practices of industrial organisations have indicated, this support is not always satisfactory, as most of the existing approaches and tools assume that the creation, maintenance and verification of traceability relations is the responsibility of software developers, and provide little or no support to them in carrying out these tasks. Furthermore, the emergence of new approaches to the specification and development of software systems has introduced new types of software artefacts and processes and, as a consequence, requires the development of new types of relations to establish traceability between them.

The aim of this special issue is to provide a forum for presenting the most recent, innovative and consolidated strands of research addressing issues relevant (but not limited) to:

traceability between requirements specifications, static and dynamic software design, models, system architecture models, implementation artefacts, and test models
traceability between software artefacts and business processes traceability between software artefacts, software processes and stakeholders
traceability in emerging forms of software systems development including (a) development of software product lines, (b) component-based development, (c) service-centric development, and (d) agent-oriented development
representation, detection, verification, and maintenance of traceability links
interoperable architectures for supporting traceability in settings characterised by the deployment of heterogeneous tools, and distributed and independently evolving artefacts visualisation of traceability links
models for deploying traceability links in decision making
economics of traceability
empirical studies of traceability

SUBMISSIONS:

We invite submissions of original papers that have not been submitted for review or published elsewhere. All submissions will be reviewed against criteria of quality, relevance, originality, significance, and soundness. Paper preparation guidelines can be found at the web-site of the journal.

Submissions should be sent to:

Dr. George Spanoudakis Department of Computing, School of Informatics, City University, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, UK E-mail: gespan@soi.city.ac.uk Tel: + 44 20 70408413 Fax: + 44 2070400244

Prospective authors should note that the publisher imposes a page charge of $30 US dollars per published printed page. For more information, please contact the guest editors:

Dr. George Spanoudakis Department of Computing, School of Informatics, City University Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, UK E-mail: gespan@soi.city.ac.uk Tel: + 44 20 70408413 Fax: + 44 2070400244

Dr. Andrea Zisman Department of Computing, School of Informatics, City University Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, UK E-mail: a.zisman@soi.city.ac.uk Tel: + 44 20 70408346 Fax: + 44 2070400244

IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadline for submission of papers:	June 1, 2004
Provisional publication date:	June 2005 (Vol. 15, No. 3)