MOTIVATION

Our society is more dependent than ever on the quality of the software that makes it run. The company where we work, our trips, our telecommunications, our savings, our healthcare, our national security and even our professional and social circles depend on it. Software is the core of contemporary systems and its quality has then been, for the past decades, a recurrent topic that brought into existence many books, journals, standards, certification initiatives, conferences, interest groups, projects, tools, niche consulting companies, university courses and training initiatives.

Quality is a crosscutting concern in the Software and Systems Engineering bodies of knowledge and encompasses product, processes and systems aspects, as it can be noticed in SEBoK 1.2 and SWEBOK V.3. Quality is a concern in most chapters, either in system and software requirements, design, construction, testing or maintenance. Software Quality Engineering has become a de facto profession, as evidenced by ASQ’s certification scheme and associated body of knowledge.

Software Engineering is a bubbling pot where a large community of researchers and practitioners pours new methods, techniques and tools at a great pace, most often with a final claim on system and software quality improvement. Unfortunately, not so often, are those new proposals presented along with some evidence of their “goodness”. Despite the awareness of our community as a whole, we also need to increase substantially the number of primary and secondary studies checking the conformance of software quality concerned with the claims produced by other researchers (i.e. replication studies) or investigating new quality features regarding software systems.

This thematic track will be a forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators that apply primary and secondary studies strategies for assessing, surveying and improving software quality. We aim at fostering the exchange of ideas that will help exploring, understanding, and modeling the software quality phenomena based on evidence. We look for studies on software quality that may range from primary (from case studies to controlled experiments, either applying quantitative or qualitative techniques) to secondary (from mapping studies to [quasi] systematic reviews, including meta-analysis or aggregation when possible). Novel and replication studies regarding software quality will be both welcomed. Submitted papers should provide an explicit description of the empirical strategy that was applied. We encourage the use of structured abstracts as suggested by the Information and Software Technology Journal.


PAPER SUBMISSION

Authors should submit to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=quatic2014 a PDF version of their paper. Papers must be in IEEE format and not exceed 6 pages, including figures, references, and appendices. Submissions must be original and will be reviewed by the Track Program Committee. Accepted papers will be published in the electronic IEEE proceedings of QUATIC’2014, subject to one of the authors registering for the conference. The authors of the 3 best papers of this thematic track will be invited to submit extended versions to the main track of the conference. More info on the QUATIC’2014 selection process and its tracks can be found at http://2014.quatic.org.


CHAIRS

Guilherme Horta Travassos, COPPE/UFRJ, Brazil
Fernando Brito Abreu, ISCTE-IUL & CITI/FCT/UNL, Portugal


LOCAl CO-ORGANIZING CHAIR

Miguel Goulão, FCT, New University of Lisbon, Portugal


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Casper Lassenius, Aalto University, Finland
Emilia Mendes, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Fabio Queda Bueno Silva, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
Jeffrey Carver, University of Alabama, USA
Martin Höst, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Hakan Erdogmus, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Kathia Marçal de Oliveira, Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis, France
Marcos Kalinowski, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil
Maria Teresa Baldassarre, University of Bari, Italy
Sílvia Abrahão, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Stefan Biffl, Technische Universität Wien, Austria
Stefan Wagner, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Tayana Uchoa Conte, Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Brazil
Tore Dybå, SINTEF and University of Oslo, Norway