WorkshopsEASE 2025

6th International DevOps Quality Management (DevOps-QM)

Organizers: Arif Ali Khan, Muhammad Azeem Akbar, Shahid Hussain, Muhammad Ovais Ahmad

DevOps is a framework that integrates both the development and operation activities and bridges the gap between them. DevOps practices are getting significant research and industrial attention because of its attributes, i.e., continuous value delivery, faster time to market, frequent accommodation of changes, and superior quality. The 2017 software trends highlighted that DevOps would become a well-established and accepted approach across the software industry. However, quality management plays a significant role between the development and operation silos. In DevOps, quality assurance works as a bridge between all the disciplines from customers and business to development and operation. For instance, exploring the quality management issues in DevOps becomes an urgent need for software companies striving to adopt DevOps practices. This workshop aims to provide a venue for advances in state of the art in DevOps quality management approaches, practices, and tools. To this end, the workshop brings together experts from academia and industry, working in the diverse areas of quality assurance, testing, performance engineering, agile software engineering, and model-based development to identify, define, and disseminate novel quality-aware approaches to DevOps.

3rd Workshop on evaLuation and assEssment in softwARe eNgineers’ Education and tRaining (LEARNER 2025)

Organizers: Mehrdad Saadatmand, Gregory Gay, Serge Demeyer, Eray Tüzün

Software engineers need to acquire a rich set of soft and hard skills in order to be able to deliver high-quality software systems that meet stakeholders’ needs. Such a skill set can be acquired through different educational and training approaches from formal education in schools and universities to workplace training and capstone projects, from offline classes to online, from coding clubs to boot camps and contests, up to the use of any resource or technology for education and training of present and future software engineers. These educational and training approaches need to be assessed by educators or trainers. To do so, it is needed to compare the desired or expected learning outcomes with the actual results. LEARNER 2025 is a workshop interested in any aspect concerning the evaluation and assessment of educational and training approaches for present and future software engineers. Contributions aiming to evaluate and assess the skills above-mentioned, as well as engagement and retention in the education and training of software engineers, are also of interest to the workshop.

5th International Workshop on Software Security Engineering

Organizers: Dr. Sajjad Mahmood, Dr. Mohammad Alshayeb, Dr. Mahmood Niazi

Over the last decade, many organizations have focused on software security because modern applications typically operate in a hostile network-based environment. Traditionally, organizations have tried to address security concerns by finding and fixing security vulnerabilities once the software development cycle is completed. Software needs to be secured against any unauthorized users, and this can be achieved by incorporating security mechanisms into different phases of the software development lifecycle. However, incorporating security practices and processes into different software development life cycle phases remains a challenge. Software security is evolving due to increasing failure rates of software projects, economic downturn, software development without security in mind, globalization, and outsourcing. The empirical software engineering researchers need new approaches, models, and tools for addressing various emerging software security challenges in this modern age. There is a need for empirical evidence to support different new approaches in software security research and practice. This will provide researchers with innovative knowledge on developing different software security processes and practices. This will also help improve existing software security approaches and processes to build secure software effectively. This workshop will bring together and advance the work undertaken on software security. The outcome of this workshop will provide researchers and practitioners with a firm basis on which to develop different practices/ tools/ techniques based on an understanding of how and where they fit into secure software development and research. New practices/ tools/ techniques could then be developed targeting the secure software engineering community.

2nd International Workshop on Empirical Studies for Quantum Software Engineering (E-QSE)

Organizers: Fabiano Pecorelli, Antonino Ferraro, Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Manuel A. Serrano

Quantum Programming has been increasingly recognized in recent years, with a growing consensus among researchers and practitioners that this emerging technology has the potential to significantly reshape the landscape of computation. The workshop’s objective is to foster a community where both researchers and practitioners can engage in discussions about novel ideas and share fresh insights on Empirical Studies in Quantum Software Engineering, with the ultimate goal of addressing previously unsolved problems.

1st Workshop on Evaluation of Qualitative Aspects of Intelligent Software Assistants (EQUISA)

Organizers: Claudio Di Sipio, Valeria Pontillo, Riccardo Rubei, Pablo Gómez-Abajo

Intelligent software assistants have been defined as automated approaches based on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models that aim to support end users in several aspects of software development lifecycles. While traditional systems are based on a curated knowledge base that represents the main source of the recommendation process, the advent of cutting-edge generative AI models, e.g., foundation and pre-trained models, is dramatically changing how those systems are designed, developed, and evaluated. Therefore, it is pivotal to examine foundational aspects that could shape the next generation of those systems by ensuring reliable, unbias, and trustworthy recommendations, thus increasing the overall quality of complex software systems.

Motivated by the need to ensure quality in advanced systems, EQUISA is a dedicated forum for discussing the qualitative aspects of intelligent software assistants, from their design to their deployment in real-world applications. Our workshop will bring together software developers, professionals, and empirical software engineering researchers who are actively involved in the development of software assistants and generative AI systems and are interested in gaining practical insights and empirical research skills to enhance their academic and industrial projects.