Engineering TrackSCAM 2024

Call for papers

The Engineering Track in the 24th IEEE International Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2024) looks for papers that discuss innovations and solutions to practical problems that researchers and practitioners face in source code analysis and manipulation of software systems. With the research advancements in source code analysis during the past decades, the industry has adopted many of the research ideas and built tools and techniques to solve real-world problems in daily jobs of software engineers. The Engineering Track provides an opportunity to discuss these important and often overlooked ideas and achievements so that software engineers and researchers can use them to improve their engineering development and produce high-quality software. This track aims to bring researchers and software engineers to communicate and share their insights and collaborate on tools, libraries, and infrastructure for source code analysis.

This track welcomes six-page papers (included references) that report on the design and implementation of tools for source code analysis and manipulation, as well as libraries, infrastructure, and real-world studies. The papers are expected to discuss engineering work artifacts that have NOT been published before as the main contribution. We encourage submissions that accompany papers in the Research Track.

What artifacts qualify as Engineering Track material?

• Tools: Software or hardware that facilitate source code analysis.
• Libraries: Reusable APIs and frameworks.
• Infrastructure: Projects that provide/facilitate access to data for reproducibility.
• Data: Reusable datasets for other researchers to reproduce the results.
• Real-world Studies: Studies that focus on how tools, libraries, infrastructure and data enable research.
• Engineering challenges: Identifying engineering challenges that remain unresolved and have impact on research in source-code analysis.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Program transformation, refactoring, analysis, optimization and measurement.
• Mining repositories, revisions and changes.
• Bad smell detection, clone management, and program comprehension.
• Concern, concept and feature localization and mining.
• Source-level testing, verification, bug detection and prediction, security vulnerability analysis.
• Natural language analysis of source code artifacts.

Submission guidelines

All submissions must be in English and should be submitted electronically in PDF format using EasyChair.

The submission length has a limit of six pages, with the expectation that authors use the space to discuss artifact motivation, design, and use cases in detail. Papers must conform to the IEEE proceedings paper format guidelines. Templates in Latex and Word are available on IEEE’s website. All submissions must be in English and should be submitted electronically in PDF format. Each submission will be reviewed by members of the Engineering Track program committee. Authors of accepted papers will be required to present their contributions at the conference.

The key criterion for acceptance is that the paper should (a) follow the above mentioned guidelines and (b) make an original contribution that can benefit practitioners in the field now and/or others designing and building artifacts for source code analysis and manipulation. The artifacts can range from an early research prototype to a polished deployed product. Papers about commercial products are welcome, as long as the guidelines described above are followed.

Videos and other demo material may be taken into account by reviewers as they review the paper, but the paper should be self contained. In order to preserve the anonymity of the reviewers, such material should be hosted on an anonymous public source, or made available in such a way that the track chairs can download them once and redistribute them to reviewers.

All authors, reviewers, and organizers are expected to uphold the IEEE Code of Conduct. Failure to do so may lead to a (desk) rejection of the paper.

Double-blind Review

This year, we are following a double-blind reviewing process. Submitted papers must adhere to the following rules: - Author names and affiliations must be omitted. (The track co-chairs will check compliance before reviewing begins.) - References to authors’ own related work must be in the third person. (For example, instead of writing “We build on our previous work…” you should write “We build on the work of…”)

If the program chairs find that authors did not respect the rules of double-blind review they can decide to (desk) reject the paper.

Artifact evaluation

ICSME, VISSOFT, and SCAM have joined once more forces and present a single Artifact Evaluation Track for the three venues. We invite authors of any paper accepted to SCAM 2024 to submit artifacts associated with their papers for evaluation. Papers with artifacts that meet the review criteria will be awarded badges, noting their contributions to open science in software engineering.

More information on the Call for Papers of the Joint Artifact Evaluation Track will be available at the ICSME 2024 web page (https://conf.researchr.org/home/icsme-2024).

Proceedings

All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings, which will be available through the IEEE Digital Library.