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Call for Contributions
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Doctoral Symposium at the 16th International Software Product Line Conference
(SPLC 2012) -- Salvador, Brazil, September 2-7, 2012
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Doctoral Symposium Chair
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Rick Rabiser, Johannes Kepler Univ. Linz, Austria

Advisor Panel/Reviewers
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o Claudia Maria Lima Werner, Federal Univ. of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
o Goetz Botterweck, Lero and University of Limerick, Ireland
o Klaus Schmid, Univ. of Hildesheim, Germany
o Kyo C. Kang, POSTECH, South Korea
o Tomi Männistö, Aalto Univ., Finland

Important Dates
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Submission deadline June 1, 2012 (extended)
Notification of acceptance June 22, 2012
Camera-ready version July 6, 2012
Doctoral Symposium September 3, 2012

Motivation
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The goal of the SPLC Doctoral Symposium is to provide a supportive environment
that enables doctoral students to get feedback on and improve their research
work. Students will have the opportunity to discuss their research, especially
goals, methods, and preliminary results with experienced members of the community
(see advisor panel). Thus, the symposium offers a unique opportunity for Ph.D.
students to gather valuable expert feedback with respect to their research work
and to get into contact with other students who are at a similar stage. The
overall aim of the symposium is to improve the quality of doctoral theses in
the area of software product lines. The event is dedicated to Ph.D. candidates
(2nd year or later!) with initial results that are still not mature enough for
a conference full paper submission. The intent is to promote fruitful discussions
and provide valuable feedback to the candidates. All topics that are relevant to
the SPLC are also relevant to the doctoral symposium.

Submissions
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Student participants applying to the SPLC 2012 Doctoral Symposium should prepare
a submission package consisting of two parts: a research plan (doctoral symposium
paper) and a letter of recommendation from your supervisor. All submissions must
be in English and in PDF format. The research plan must be a maximum of 8 pages
in the ACM Proceedings Format (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates).
Submissions should contain no proprietary or confidential
material and should cite no proprietary or confidential publications.

Part I: Research Plan/Doctoral Symposium Paper
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To participate, students should prepare a research plan, i.e., a paper that
explains the what, why, when, and how of their Ph.D. research:
• What: What is the problem you intend to investigate?
• Why: Why is the work important?
• When: What has already been done and what remains to be done?
• How: How are you going to do the work?

In detail, the following structure and content is strongly recommended:

Title of your work, your name, email address, postal address, personal website, abstract
Introduction and Motivation
• Introduction (area of study); description of the problem (that you tackle);
what the literature says about this problem (where does existing work fail?); how
you (plan to) tackle this problem; how you (plan to) implement your
solution/envisioned result; how you (plan to) validate your solution
Research Issues, Objectives, and Questions (and hypotheses)
• The main research issues / objectives / questions / hypotheses clearly stated.
Research Methodology and Research Design
• The research method(s) you are using or plan to use, with appropriate references.
• The research design: how you concretely (plan to) apply the method(s), e.g., data
collection and analysis, set-up for measurements/experiments, case studies, etc.
• How do you plan to evaluate your results? Threats to validity?
Preliminary key results or contributions
• Outline/Overview of the proposed solution, results of preliminary data analysis,
etc.
• An example to explain how the solution would work (this is very important!)
• What is expected to be the main result or contribution?
Work plan
• Outline of the structure of your thesis
• Work accomplished so far and work remaining to be done
• Publication plan and other tasks planned
• A detailed work plan for the next 6-12 months.
Key references

The idea of the research plan paper is to provide clear enough material to be useful as
a basis for guidance and discussion. Therefore, students should think about the above
points carefully and try to make their ideas as concrete and clear as possible.
Students at relatively early stages of their research will certainly have difficulty
addressing some of these areas, but should still attempt to do the best they can. It is
strongly recommended that students discuss these points with their supervisors!

Part II: Letter of Recommendation
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Ask your supervisor/advisor for a letter of recommendation. It should include your name
and a candidate assessment of the current status of your thesis research and an
expected date for thesis submission. The letter should be in PDF format and be sent by
email to the Doctoral Symposium chair.

Where to Submit
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Submit your Research Plan via the conference submission system (see www.splc2012.net).
In addition, ask your supervisor to send a recommendation letter directly to the
Doctoral Symposium chair: firstname.lastname(at)jku.at.

Review and Evaluation Criteria
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Submissions will be evaluated by at least 2 reviewers from the advisor panel according
to the relevance, originality and feasibility of the described research work. For each
paper at least one reviewer (see advisor panel above) will be available at the
symposium and there will be a unique opportunity for discussion among reviewers and
participants.

Format and Organization
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The symposium will be held in conjunction with SPLC 2012 on one of the workshop days.
Each participant gets the chance to present his/her work (either as full presentation
or as short presentation) and will get feedback from the panelists and the audience.
In particular, the presenters will be provided with an opportunity for direct
discussions with the reviewers. Students are recommended to think in advance of the
particular points they want to get feedback on/they want to discuss.

Publication
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The research plan papers will be published as part of the SPLC 2012 conference
proceedings (second volume) which will also contain workshop papers and tool demo
papers. All submitters are expected to be able to meet the tight deadlines for
camera-ready submissions and to present their work at the SPLC 2012 conference.