Software as a service (SaaS) – a framework for encapsulating and delivering applications as services has been a very popular architecture of choice for many business applications. Instead of installing and maintaining software, services are accessed on the cloud, avoiding complex and costly software and hardware management. The framework has been a great success primarily due to how it allows for cost-effective modular service requirements decomposition and modular service composition during the development, operation, maintenance, and evolution of the encapsulated software and the underlying computing platform.

But despite the successes and unparalleled popularity, next generation of software services are increasingly pressured to become more than just encapsulated code with a service interface. Demands abound for such services to be context and situation-aware, driven by behaviors observed and captured from both the environment and humans, intrinsically modifying their service delivery behavior accordingly. They are also expected to be self-aware and autonomous, sentient of their own offerings and intelligent to reason about other opportunities that can be afforded by autonomously teaming and bonding with other self-aware services. And with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), services are further required to be ultra-mobile, ultra-fine-grained, ultra-trustworthy, and ultra-intelligent, capable of learning from their own data as well as their peers. Such IoT services must survive the presence of unavoidable uncertainties from the data, the analytics, and the environment, and must cope with unpredictable ambiguities brought about by end-user interactions.

Moreover, human-centric concerns in service design are expanding beyond the traditional focus to include developers, operators and end-users, alike, in the end-to-end process of developing, deploying, managing and evolving such services as the underlying technologies change and evolve.

Next generation software services are therefore anticipated to be the superheroes that, in addition to encapsulating service code, do somehow apply state-of-the-art techniques that cuts across the areas of service computing, machine learning, software engineering, pervasive computing, IoT, dependable computing, psychophysiological or brain science, autonomics, among others, to support the emerging cutting-edge applications of the future. Recognizing the need for a disruptive approach to enabling next generation software services, the IEEE World Congress on Services has dedicated a special symposium organized by academic and industrial leaders from the software engineering and services computing communities to chart a way forward. The International Symposium on Advances in Software Services Engineering which was held in 2021 and 2022 has concluded with a set of recommendations, which is a cross-cutting declaration and a manifesto of a new field of study named Software Service Engineering (SSE), based on the prevalent body of knowledge and professional practice of software engineering methods and tools, as well as advances in the other disciplines as described above. This inaugural International Conference on Software Services Engineering (SSE) will aim to further establish this field and to organize the participation and contributions of its constituent R&D communities.

Original research and bold ideas that fall under the following themes are sought. Other innovative and novel themes are also encouraged:

Human in the Loop
Human-Behavior-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Services
Human-Centric Software Service Engineering
Influential and Persuasive Software Services for Human-in-the-loop Systems

IoT: Context Awareness & Autonomy
Context-Aware DevOps Platforms for Software Services
Microservices-Based Autonomous IoT Service Frameworks
Harmonizing Autonomous Services with Ambiguities and Uncertainties

NextGen SSE
Trustworthiness-by-Design Architecture for Software Services
AI-Enabled Software Service Engineering
Software Service Engineering for Responsible AI

Intelligent Operations
Manageability-Preserved Dynamic Composition of Individually Administered Microservices
DevOps and service engineering
Maintenance of service-oriented systems

Industrial SSE
Applications and case studies
Tools
Experiences